Bad enterprise search is a common problem in businesses – but it’s not always the vendor’s fault. Customers pay big bucks for enterprise search software but they often don’t have a strategy for deploying the program effectively.

“Many companies end up disappointed and frustrated with high-priced products that failed to live up to expectations,” Forrester analyst Matthew Brown writes in research released this week. “Yet, it’s surprising how little effort these companies typically put into creating a compelling search experience for employees – especially given the potential productivity gains effective search implies.”

Business search offers complications that don’t really affect consumer search sites such as Google, Brown notes. Business content lacks context, links and often has little text. Workers must store and access information securely, and need information of the highest quality, not information that’s the most popular.

Brown offers seven tips for enterprises looking to maximize the effectiveness of search. Here’s a summary:

1. Define objectives. Identify who is searching, what categories of information they’re looking for, and what they need to do with that information. Since you can’t account for every type of information workers need, define broad worker roles, like sales professionals and market researchers, and their most common search scenarios.

2. Set the scope. Ask yourself whether you’re searching a single repository or multiple repositories, which content must be accessed by users, which back-end repositories are required for a given search scope, and what are the unique characteristics and contents of each repository.

3. Find a good method for enriching content with descriptive text and metadata. Manual attribution can work with small sets of authoritative information, but may not be worth the effort for large amounts of data that changes rapidly, Brown writes.

4. Set your requirements, then list products and vendors to consider. Prices have fallen over the past decade and the list of vendors is long, including Autonomy, Endeca Technologies, Fast, Google Enterprise, Recommind and Vivisimo. “The key is not getting enamored with irrelevant features, but instead focusing on products that adequately meet the organizations requirements over a specified time period,” Brown writes.