Search is among the most disruptive innovations of our time. It influences what we buy and where we go. It shapes how we learn and what we believe.  It’s also a radically multidisciplinary, creative challenge. In this talk, Morville defines a pattern language for search and discovery that embraces user psychology and behavior, cross-channel information architecture,multisensory interaction, and emerging technology. He identifies design principles that apply across the categories of web, ecommerce, enterprise, desktop, mobile, social, and real time. He explains how future methods and user experience deliverables can help us to create better search interfaces and applications today and invent the improbable discovery tools of tomorrow.

Leading search industry analyst Sue Feldman will lead an executive panel discussion to explore strategic objectives for deploying search in large enterprise settings. Feldman will leverage her deep knowledge of this industry to draw out the underlying challenges of information findability in these organizations, the strategies these CIOs have effectively deployed, as well as the business value that they’ve achieved through strategic search management.

Most discussion about measuring the quality of search experience refers to either direct user feedback or search engine statistics such as recall and precision. But enterprise search is actually an integrated ecosystem of content, processes, applications, and usage patterns. This session will examine the six major focus areas that comprise a sustainable search experience so that attendees will be able to strategically decide which improvements to make first, measure the impact of each improvement, and fine-tune their enterprise search ecosystem as content and usage interests change over time.

Customers are flocking to the web to discuss everything from customer service complaints to product recommendations. JetBlue executives are mining unstructured text for insight into customer thoughts and actions. This session will discuss how companies can develop an efficient knowledge repository to enable more effective creation, maintenance, and administration of business knowledge from the web and other sources, and link it with all service-relevant documents. Presenters will provide examples of what worked and, more importantly, what hasn’t, in analyzing social media content.

Thumplay.com is the largest and fastest-growing provider of mobile content, delivered directly to consumers and via white-labeled sites for many well-known content providers such as MTV Mobile. With massive amounts of query volumes and customers who want the most relevant information in almost real-time, Thumbplay needed to ensure its content aggregation and search capabilities are of the highest quality and can scale to meet both demand peaks and the company’s growing customer base.  Specifically, the company was focused on reducing latency, improving relevancy of results and streamlining operation of its white-label business.  In this session attendees will learn about Thumbplay's ability to facilitate real-time content ingestion, allowing items to appear online within milliseconds of being published and how the organization improved its ability to support massive query volumes and frequent, low-latency updates, while reducing operating costs and expediting development.

A global workforce has become central to the success of the enterprise, and finding and matching the right employee to the right job is a key element of a company’s competitiveness and profitability. IBM, with more than 300,000 employees worldwide, developed a solution to this challenge in the form of a “Professional Marketplace.” This session will detail the design approaches used to leverage enterprise search for matching workforce supply with demand and demonstrate best practices in integrating multiple technologies to solve this key business problem for any globally integrated enterprise.

The Statistics Canada site wasn’t “built to code,” was not “energy efficient,” and there are many “treasures” that get in the way. However, it did have a solid foundation (a culture of taxonomy and metadata application) and strong beams (a relational database to link surveys, data, and publications). During the past few years, Statistics Canada has focused on understanding user needs, surmounting operational challenges, and exploring features of the existing search engine. This presentation will demonstrate faceted search, search suggestions, and a simplified advanced search query builder. It will also share some of the constraints and trade-offs when developing search in an established bureaucracy.

The presentation provides a practical application of chaos theory for creating useful content focal points from the chaotic mess of content resources distributed across the web. Several examples will be provided, both from the internet, where socially generated content is exploding, and from the enterprise, where social tools are contributing to content bloat. The examples will illustrate how activity can make information more discoverable and easier to explore through various visualization techniques. The approach can be targeted to specific types of content such as blogs or online news sites, as well as subsets of unstructured or structured content within the enterprise.

The best way to prevent terrorist attacks is before they start (or get off the ground). Intelligence agencies collect huge amounts of data—it's just not shared—and it’s well-known that data integration isn’t working in the security area. SSI is using sophisticated search and information analysis technology from MuseGlobal to design systems for Homeland Security, CIA, TSA, and other agencies to “connect the dots” so that the right information is in the right hands at the right time. This involves collecting, normalizing, and enhancing data in real time for humans to make informed security assessments.

At DuPont, creating sustainable solutions is at the core of its business, both externally and internally. DuPont’s IT staff identified the need for a highly accurate and intuitive search tool that provided a customized fit that would meet a wide range of needs for its global users. Instead of developing custom apps for disparate groups, the company was able to adapt one search tool to deliver a rich search experience to many.

The broad category of enterprise search is finished. First-generation enterprise search was not easy to use and produced unsatisfactory results
from a usability and relevance standpoint. Today’s knowledge workers demand role-specific, contextual search anywhere they work. In this closing keynote, Owens will provide insight into how to “right-size” an enterprise search project for different roles, application areas, and scenarios; what the future of search will look like as it becomes essential plumbing in a multimodal, heterogeneous content architecture; and why next-generation search initiatives can—and should—thrive in a challenging economic climate.