How to be a Search Consultant

If you have thought about hiring a search consultant or working as one, you may have asked yourself what exactly search consultants do. This post offers an opinionated perspective based on my experience.

Mine the Gaps

Helping an organization with search starts with understanding its strengths and weaknesses. Some organizations have in-house search teams, while others outsource search entirely. Some have high-quality content with rich structured data, while others struggle with basic content understanding. Some have developed robust analytics platforms to analyze search traffic, while others struggle to learn from searcher behavior.

Understanding an organization’s search gaps is a prerequisite for delivering value. Glaring weaknesses suggest opportunities for quick wins. Strengths are resources that provide leverage. Most importantly, an inventory of the organization’s resources — especially its talent, technology, and data — helps determine what improvements are possible or practical in the near term.

Organizations that engage me are eager to hear my assessment of their strengths and weaknesses. They want to know if they have the in-house talent to implement AI-powered search, whether they should reconsider their search technology stack, and whether their data assets are sufficient to support their ambitions around relevance and ranking. At a high level, they want to identify the areas with the greatest room for improvement.

By performing such an assessment, consultants demonstrate respect and understanding. We recognize that clients are not starting from scratch and do not waste time and resources telling clients what they already know or offering advice they cannot use. Ultimately, we help them prioritize initiatives with the highest potential to deliver meaningful, timely returns.

Get Real

Gaps hint at opportunities, but delivering value requires identifying concrete opportunities with measurable outcomes. The challenge for a search consultant is to quickly identify and analyze those opportunities.

Auditing a search application can reveal glaring qualitative issues with relevance or query understanding. It can also expose gaps in components like autocomplete and spelling correction. Moreover, a search consultant needs to experience the search application as an end-user to establish empathy with searchers. Most of my consulting engagements start with an audit of the end-to-end search experience.

Quantitative opportunity analysis requires a more rigorous, data-driven approach. Query logs provide insight into the distribution of search traffic. Tables show how those queries perform, both immediately at the query level and downstream at the session level. Analyzing these tables is the best and fastest way to identify underperforming queries that present concrete opportunities to improve business metrics. These include frequent queries and classes of infrequent queries that constitute meaningful demand.

I spend a significant fraction of my engagements analyzing this sort of data to find opportunities and prioritize projects to address them, doing things like analyzing the autocomplete engagement and downstream query performance or measuring friction in search journeys. I have learned to focus on segmenting queries into classes that represent different types of information needs, e.g., known-item retrieval vs. exploration. Some clients are impatient to hear proposed solutions, but they forgive the delay when they see how a principled analysis prioritizes the problems worth solving.

Qualitative and quantitative opportunity analysis are key steps in a search consulting engagement. They might even be the entire engagement. The main job of a search consultant is to guide organizations to prioritize their search investments around concrete, measurable opportunities.

Balance the Portfolio

Search consultants can engage both strategically and tactically. Both approaches can be effective, but consultants need to find the right balance for an engagement.

Strategic consulting has enormous leverage and long-term impact. Helping clients prioritize their road maps is some of the most valuable work a search consultant can provide. However, strategic consulting has a downside: the value may take months or years to materialize — especially if it involves infrastructure or hiring. I have helped many organizations with their long-term planning. While I know this is some of my most valuable work, I chafe at the deferred gratification and I am sure they do too.

In contrast, tactical consulting delivers immediate value. If an organization has already decided to prioritize something specific like autocomplete or spelling correction, then a consulting engagement can focus on producing a quick, focused win. And sometimes those wins are big. I helped a client fix its query-independent definition of result popularity, and the result was a dramatic improvement in ranking and engagement. Even if a tactical engagement does not maximize long-term value, it reduces time to value. This reduces risk and establishes a foundation of trust. For this reason, I always try to deliver a tactical win early in an engagement.

As a search consultant, I try to strike the right balance between strategic and tactical engagement and deliver a balanced portfolio.

Listen, Learn, Teach

Organizations engage search consultants to address gaps in their in-house expertise. For example, an organization may lack a framework to recognize whether it struggles with precision, recall, or desirability. It may never have considered the distinctions between relevance, ranking, query understanding, and content understanding. A search consultant should help organizations gain some of that critical search expertise.

That said, most organizations have a limited appetite for learning. They are focused on their business objectives rather than on becoming world-class search or AI experts. Good consultants prioritize, distill, and communicate key insights necessary to make clients successful.

This process cannot be a monologue. Consultants can only learn what clients need by being good listeners. Moreover, listening to clients is one of the best ways for consultants to learn new things. While I take pride in my search expertise, I continuously learn from my clients. Some of what I have learned is domain-specific, but much of it is highly generalizable. For example, talking to countless stakeholders across organizations has enriched my understanding of the many — and often conflicting — objectives for which a search application can optimize. That understanding allows me to better help my clients navigate critical tradeoffs.

In short, a search consultant needs to be a good listener, a quick learner, and a patient teacher.

Be Agile

A cornerstone of modern software engineering is agile development, which tells us that we should first build a minimum viable product (MVP) and then iterate on it incrementally. This approach not only reduces time to value but also reduces risk by collecting feedback early and often.

A search consulting engagement should embrace a similar model. While an engagement can start with a preliminary plan, it is important not to over-engineer the plan. I have found that what I learn in the first few weeks of an engagement often changes my perspective how how best to allocate and prioritize my efforts. For example, I have worked with clients concerned about understanding long natural language queries, only to find out from analyzing their logs that most of their queries contained one or two words.

My preference is to start every engagement with a short, tightly scoped pilot project — an MVP. It could be a quick qualitative or quantitative analysis, and it could focus tactically on a particular search problem that the client has already decided to prioritize. Completing a short project this way is a great way to ramp up, as well as establish trust.

Summary

What I have described is an opinionated perspective on search consulting. There are many consultants out there, and many roads to success. YMMV.

Nonetheless, I stand by my advice. Understanding an organization’s strengths and weaknesses and performing opportunity analysis are prerequisites for delivering value — as well as valuable deliverables in their own right. Balancing strategic and tactical work hedges risk, as does following an agile process.

Whether you are hiring a search consultant or working as one, I urge you to approach the process deliberately. Whichever side of the relationship you are on, I hope this post helps you frame search consulting engagements.