Is enterprise search useful at all?: lessons learned from studying user behavior
Enterprise search is a growing industry: A recent report from the EU states the total revenue of EU-headquartered search vendors between 100 and 200 million Euros. However, enterprise search seems to be widely ignored by the academic information systems (IS) community. Little is known about user-adoption aspects of enterprise search, as almost no academic case studies and very few user evaluations are reported, leaving the topic more or less in hand of practitioners. A preliminary literature review reveals enterprise search user-aspects and especially perceived overall helpfulness as under-investigated subjects. The following paper provides insights into a qualitative study involving ten engineers from automotive and rail industry. While observing them using a piloted enterprise search engine, the authors report qualitative findings on how engineers apply enterprise search on project-relevant documents. With this paper, the authors want to contribute to the user-centered investigation of enterprise search and intranet search behavior and highlight the importance of scientific user studies in enterprise search.