What is this thing called Personal Search

On a recent visit to a very large storage vendor I had a discussion about a social portal that they had developed. It was struggling to get user engagement and they were puzzled as to why.

My response seemed a surprise to them. Social software is personal. Users think of it as a personal tool. If you look at the most popular web 2.0 platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or even Delicious they are tools that provide a benefit to users on a personal level.

You cannot force user engagement. The tools either help them (so they use it), or they really don't provide much benefit (they don't use them). Facebook is about personal expression, Twitter about having a voice, and Delicious is about sharing your own interests. If tools don't deliver this personal benefit then users will not use them.

In a round about way this gets us back to the companies social portal. Enterprise 2.0 software suffers from this lack of personal, intimate interaction. It has a corporate aura about it, residing on the corporate portal, and workers don't feel the same personal connection with it. Does it really help them get their work done or just create more work for them? One more application they have to use.

As we discussed Jumper and how it might help I told them that if they deployed Jumper on the same corporate portal that it would likely suffer the same fate. The users would not feel any personal connection with it.

Jumper works best when it is deployed directly into a community of users. Smaller deployments that can be customized even personalized to users interests. I asked what groups had heavy information requirements and they mentioned the project managers, research lab teams, product development groups, etc. and I discussed that a customized Jumper deployed onto a small VM with minimal system resource requirements should be deployed for each of these groups. Users feel a more personal connection with a bookmarking engine when it is focused in this way. Search returns only the results relevant to them, not the whole company. Resources have been tagged by colleagues that they know and trust, basically their friends at work who they can holler over the cube wall at.

You have to change the way you think about applications. From the web to mobile phones applications are more specialized, more organic in their user communities. And large organizations need to understand and adapt to this expectation from their users. Search is no different.

Personal search or a point solution approach really means a more customized or tailored approach to search that meets the unique needs of its users. It is precisely because Jumper is an open tool that you can change to meet your own
unique requirements that this works so well. Precisely because it is license free and light-weight that it can easily be deployed in this way. The ability to reflect personal or group interests includes greater flexibility in the terminology or data dictionary to include a hybrid of corporate taxonomy and group based folksonomy. Specialist users have very specific and often highly technical terms that never make it in a formalized corporate taxonomy. Yet these terms matter to these specific users and make it easier to search and find things. Another critical factor is that the tag fields can be customized to meet the unique needs of users. For instance, with structured knowledge tags a materials engineer or biologist will have very different tagging needs than a SAN storage architect or a chemist. One might require a tag to identify the protein the other a tag to identify the compound, etc. A point solution approach allows the local bookmarking engine to be highly customized to meet these unique needs in a way a centralized system never could.

Personal search is not enterprise search. We understand that this tool must be simple. Easy to use, easy to navigate and intuitive. It must also provide a direct and immediate benefit to users. There must be something in it for them, it must not be a generalized tool, it must be very specific, even personal for each user to see and feel the value. It is more like a cube conversation. In this sense it must be localized. Sharing a common skill-set or job description, just as most users with similar skills are sitting together on the same floor and their conversations are based around this shared understanding so the tool must have the same level of intimacy.

This is what we mean by personal search and it requires an entirely new way of thinking about enterprise search. And it is often that thought process that is the hardest thing to change.

Building Social into Drupal Search

A customer had an existing Drupal powered Intranet site. They were excited to tell us about a project they were building for a collaborative workspace for a group of researchers that was customized to manage Karyotyping images. The collaborative workspace would tie together a number of collaboration tools they already had in use - Drupal, Jumper 2.0, and DSpace.

A researcher would create an image that needed to be stored in Dspace. The image would be uploaded to the DSpace repository. The workflow they were building would manage this process via scripts. The Drupal search module was customized to let users search for specific image thumbnails on the Intranet site. Drupal is chiefly focused on handling HTML content, so Gallery2 was installed to generate thumbnails on a preview page and extract embedded metadata.

Drupal would push the image to the DSpace repository and store the metadata and thumbnails in the Gallery. When images are recorded, Drupal offers users the option to include additional related tag objects created in Jumper 2.0. When users record a new image they have an option to tag the document or image using the Jumper 2.0 tag engine. The image is then assigned a unique identifier in the repository and published in a news feed.

The new image is picked up via the published feed and stored in the Gallery module of the research project's Drupal site. Included in the feed are the image, metadata (including the unique identifier), tag profile with pointers to any related objects. Another researcher learns that the new image is available to examine. A module was written to provide a workflow for the feeds so that the new items showed up in a block in "my workspace," and an was email generated by the notify module. Other researchers could click on a reference link to view the full res image, compare the image in the Gallery module to other images, they could click on reference links to related papers published in Connotea, they could read and edit the tag profile with new annotations, comments, or notes to build more knowledge around the image.

Using Jumper 2.0 tagging there is now a rich set of metadata associated with the image. The new metadata was published as feeds and picked up for inclusion in the DSpace repository housing the original archived image. This publishing cycle was ongoing for the life of a specific research project. The rich metadata that Jumper delivers provided the context, meaning and value to the image that was missing in traditional metadata. Critical provenance information was provided as well as links to related images or published papers. All of this made the search results more relevant.

Jumper 2.0 is an Open Community

The Jumper 2.0 Open Source Project is a community effort. We invite open participation in this blog. Anyone who is currently using the Jumper 2.0 platform, is currently doing development on the platform, or has just installed the platform please feel free to contribute. To become an author contact sperry@jumpernetworks.com and we will extend author privileges.