Supporting Information Seeking in Multinational Organizations: A Knowledge Portal Approach

As multinational organizations increasingly use the Web to seek information, there is a need for better support of searching the Web across different regions. However, support for Internet searching in non-English speaking regions is much weaker than that in English-speaking regions. To alleviate the problems, we propose a knowledge portal approach to supporting cross-regional searching of multinational organizations. The approach was used to build two Web portals in the Spanish business and Arabic medical domains. Experimental results show that our portals achieved significantly better performance (in terms of search accuracy and user satisfaction) than existing search engines in the corresponding domains. The encouraging findings point to a promising future of the approach to facilitating cross-regional searching in multinational organizations.