Via Traction Software:

“It’s not that people don’t have search or other tools and techniques to find information. They have too many tools. They have search in their email client, search on the web, the sales force automation software has its own search [and so forth]. The trouble is most organizations don’t have tools to search across everything. In spite of the fact that federated search has been around for some time, most organizations don’t have it because it’s tricky and expensive to implement.

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If all relevant content isn’t indexed, it can’t be found, but when you add more content stores to be indexed, the signal to noise ratio can get worse as coverage increases.

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But the relevance of search results often gets worse as a larger number of stovepiped and minimally cross-linked content stores are indexed. Email stores are often the worst offenders - but contain much of the most valuable working communication.

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In the enterprise, there are very few links to use for relevance ranking, and tons of duplicate files (or minor variations of the same file) attached to email that’s blasted throughout the company and scattered.”