1) There is sufficient agreement about relevance as applied to typical web searches that it is at least approximately true to talk about user-independent relevance.

2) The success of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft at returning results that satisfy users show that this relevance function can be codified (even if each of these companies guards its formula as carefully as the Coca-Cola formula.

According to a study published by Andrei Broder in 2002, navigational queries represent 26.4% of web search queries.

According to a 2007 study by Jean Véronis, 27% of Google searches and 31% of Yahoo searches return a Wikipedia result at their first link.

FWIW, I did not understand “Moreover, the nature of the web makes it possible to quantify this user-independent relevance reasonably well.”.

As somebody who has worked on both camps (enterprise and internet search), the typical user expects a Google-like quality inside the company given his/her experience on the Web.

The problem is, it is unlikely that your business information need is looking for a good hotel review for your next vacations. It is likely that is about a potential customer or competitor. And the answer is not a fact. Involves digesting and summarizing different things. Kind of sensemaking & exploratory search.

So maybe, one way to tackle the problem for enterprise search is to not use the Web search as a model, but something different.

And, speaking of imperfect dichotomies, I concede that I’m oversimplifying the distinction between web search and enterprise search. Let me try to add some nuance.

I don’t have statistics handy, but I believe that a majority of web search queries are either navigational queries best answered by a home page or popular informational queries best answered by a Wikipedia page. At least for these queries, there is near-universal agreement on what constitutes the best result. Moreover, the nature of the web makes it possible to quantify this user-independent relevance reasonably well.

How is enterprise search different? Part of the problem with characterizing enterprise search is that there really is no single characterization. There are known-item searches best answered by the enterprise analogs of home pages and Wikipedia pages. But the highest-value information needs in an enterprise are not known-item searches. Rather, they are scenarios where of searching for information to solve a problem without even the certainty that the information is available, or that the problem is framed correctly.

As for searching using metadata vs. free text, that’s a different–though very related–issue. At the risk of another oversimplification, I’d say that free text suffices for most known-item information needs, while metadata is essential for most exploratory needs. And I agree that enterprises often benefit from more predictable and reliable metadata than the web at large.

But my point here is not to try to articulate the differences between web data and enterprise data. Rather, I’m asserting a general difference between the typical expectations / needs of web search and enterprise search users.

The difference between Web and enterprise search would then be that because the enterprise is a (semi-)closed system, the metadata is more predictable and reliable, and the interests can be assumed with greater confidence.

So, don’t enterprises really want both of the alternatives? (This can be taken as a specification of the more general principle “People want everything,” which itself is a specification of the most general principle “Those damn people!”

I think it’s questionable to claim that web search currently views relevance as objective. By virtue of increasingly finer-grained user and query modeling, relevance is becoming more subjective. These methods are not yet at the sophistication of models in the library/information science community but are a move in that direction.

That said, IR existed long before web search and I think it’s dangerous to think situations different from web search are new situations for IR. Seemingly new tasks and perspectives have often been quite well-studied in the IR and information/library science literature. I think the appropriate question is: “does enterprise search have an analog in search for other corpora?” If not, what _precisely_ are the differences. The paragraph “In the enterprise, however…addresses our needs” is a little vague and makes enterprise search sound like QA.

In conclusion, I agree with your general claim that search cannot be a utility. IR consists of a set of design principles for solving search problems. The appropriateness of a technique is very dependent on the search scenario and it is the role of the IR expert to make these decisions based on experience and published results. If I need a bridge from San Francisco to Oakland, I won’t plop a down the Ben Franklin bridge. But I may call the engineer who built it.