We know that your company’s search can’t work just like Google. To counterbalance its inability to crawl the web and learn from the 100s of criteria generated by 3.5 billion people, you need a platform that supplements and complements Findability with other Browse & Discover best practices. It’s by leveraging these best practices that you’re able to get your company’s file search engine closer to the power of a World Wide Web search like Google.

Not all enterprise content management systems are the same. Some are designed for optimizing storage, others are designed for optimizing collaboration. And others are designed for optimizing Findability — this is what we’re after to have an incredible file search engine for your company.

According to McKinsey, employees spend 19% of their time looking for the information they need to do their jobs. That’s a day a week.

Improving Findability helps solve this issue. It’s the key to improving organizational performance, and in order to design for Findability, the following factors should be considered:

Does Your File Search Engine Include These?

Pick a better file search engine

The AI Survival Guide for Knowledge Managers Read this guide to future-proof knowledge management in the age of AI.

For most, our experience with company search starts and ends with a keyword search. As you can see from the graphic above, there’s a lot more to it than that.

The additional features of a sophisticated file search engine create more opportunities to find what you need. Traditional title or keyword search works OK with a small number of documents, and even smaller number of collaborators, but as your organization grows you need a file search engine capable of heavier lifting. 

Think about it: when a user doesn’t know the right search term, keywords alone don’t help them find what they’re looking for. How much time have you spent phrasing and rephrasing search terms, scrolling through email threads, or reaching out to colleagues for information you already have but can’t find? 

The best company searches go beyond keyword search and incorporate other ways to pinpoint exactly what the user needs. This is why selecting a file search engine that includes the best practices of Browse and Discover is key.

These are features that allow you to harness metadata through tags and Badges, refine and filter as you search with Faceted Navigation, browse through your organization’s tag library, and make content connections for your users, plus a whole lot more.

We often think about optimizing our customer relations, marketing campaigns, and web presence, but how much thought have you given to the efficiency of the file search engine you use to make it all happen?

Select a Better File Search Engine to Save Time, Money, and Frustration

High performing organizations can reduce the average time employees spend on information retrieval tasks by 5.5% – 6.5%. This represents a 30-35% improvement over average performing companies and equates to saving each employee 2.5 hours a week and 125 hours a year.

These improvements can be realized by any organization simply by implementing best practices in enterprise search technology with a powerful file search engine for your company.

Consider this, by increasing efficiency by just 5%, a company of 100 employees could save 15,625 hours a year. In real dollars that is a savings of approximately $625,000 each year. This makes or break money for many organizations.

While it’s easy to get lost in the day to day logistics and stress of running a business, it’s important to examine just how much time and money you’re losing because your employees aren’t able to find what they need easily.

Consider just how much money you could save by helping your people do their jobs more efficiently with a powerful file search engine for your company. Book a demo with Shelf today and we’ll show you how.