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So how do you move your organisation to this kind of framework? First you have to know what an ideal system and process look like. There are four different things you should consider. The prescription for search success 1. Identify your goal. As with any project, clearly stated goals are necessary. You need to define what a better search is. What type of content are your users trying to find? How have you tried to find it in the past? What's worked, what hasn't? What do you envision the user experience to be? Once you answer these questions, you're well on your way to defining a clear set of goals. 2. Define a common language. At some point along the way, it's critical that you establish and apply a common vernacular to your products, services, programs, and other important subjects that appear on your Web site, or within your content management system. This will most likely manifest itself as a taxonomy or thesaurus down the line. 3. Choose the right technology. There are two primary areas you should consider: search and metadata systems. Search systems should enable users to enter keywords or natural language queries, such as "Who is a local reseller for your products?" They should facilitate the ability to switch between searching and browsing to find content. Metadata systems fuel search engines by providing rich, contextual metadata around content. When assessing this technology, you should ensure that this system is driven from a controlled vocabulary, that it has a flexible import mechanism to support frequent vocabulary changes, and that it delivers accurate classification results. It's important, however, to also ensure your metadata system can support other critical functions, such as metadata storage and retrieval, concept and term extraction, and custom business logic. These features, which extend beyond pure classification, will tee you up for longer-term success for all your future initiatives. 4. Process, process, process. These three words do not have to be synonymous with frustration and pain. Process is your ally. It ensures that the goal you've identified in step one can be reached by taking your common language from step two, and applying it to your content through the software system from step three. Three key process points are:

Provide the opportunity for manual review of content and metadata. Your software solution must support this by bringing a human into the process as needed based on exceptions or accuracy checks. It's best to do this early in the content lifecycle, when the original author of the content can be easily identified. You might also opt to provide an opportunity for review later in the process to meet the needs of content and metadata managers.
Keep the impact to content contributors to a minimum. If it's hard to tag content with metadata, authors won't do it.
Ensure that the process ultimately optimises the value of metadata. If you're capturing metadata to improve search or fuel your portal, make sure that the process carries the metadata all the way through. If the process stops short, you'll find it far more challenging to demonstrate ROI, because you'll find yourself stuck in "what could be" land.

It's universally acknowledged that searching for anything can be frustrating--whether it's for a set of misplaced car keys or for a certain market report that you know is out there, somewhere, on the network. But it's also true that given a properly maintained filing cabinet, most people can find what they're looking for, especially if it has a giant yellow metadata sticky note applied to it. The name of the game is structure.

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