Master and Prepare Data for Better Relevance

Excerpt: 

The eCommerce and Enterprise Search is a multibillion dollar industry saturated with hundreds of players that compete to provide superior relevancy to their customers. Organizations continue to switch from vendor to vendor every few years desperate to find something that works. Relevancy is a function of two primary parameters: 1) The Search Engine 2) Data that feeds it. In this article, we’ll focus on the latter.

Garbage-in = Garbage-out. Traditionally, IT performs a one-time integration with a Search platform by creating a black box of ETL scripts that pull data from multiple data sources into a data feed that is required by the target Search Engine. Business has very little to no insight into the quality and variety of data that ends up in the search index. The only time when someone starts to worry about data is when a customer complains about not being able to find what they are looking for.