The coming strife over Enterprise Search

Critical factors that will make the difference


There is currently a flurry of reports and news about search which is fueled by the looming battle between high-tech star Google and the "big bad gorilla" Microsoft.
Does the question really deserves such a buzz, what are really the stakes and challenges and what does all this means for Intranet users desperately craving for effective tools to overcome the information overload a.k.a. "infoglut".
Things may not be like they appear, and specially the most hyped points may not really be the most critical ones. Here I try to sort out the wheat from the chaff.

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Report scope and flavor
        Introduction and intended purposes.
All about it in one page
        The report in a nutshell for a quick overview and reference.
Specifity of enterprise search
        Why Enterprise Search need special care.
Searching for ideas
        The big difference, Semantics!
Flexibility
        Everything has to be customizable and dynamic.
Scalability
        How large volumes should still be manageable.
Heterogenous data sources
        Reaching for all and every data nugget.
Data sources dependent contextualisations
        Grabbing the implicit meanings too.
Multilingual and crosslingual capabilities
        As you need it.
Technologies assessment
        Know enough about the promises and limitations.
Vendors survey
        See a very quick summary of about 70 vendors before you start the hunt yourself.
Glossary
        Explaining the jargon and buzzwords.
Sources
        References and links to articles and reports.

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Why all this fuss
Besides the mediatic focus on big names and big money, there is a truly pinching problem that everybody feels, we are engulfed by a rising tide of so-called "information" .
Indeed the nominal value of each bit and piece seems to decrease at an even faster rate than the increase in volumes.
The proverbial "needle in the haystack" gets harder and harder to locate.
Though the much larger pool of available knowledge on the Internet may mitigate the feeling by entertaining the illusion that we actually find more relevant and interesting data than before, corporate users know better, they are faced everyday with the nagging predicament of knowing that the right data is "out there" somewhere and yet they cannot get at it.
As Jakob Nielsen has put it, Enterprise Search is commonly "beyond contempt".
There are long standing reasons for this, the problem is not new it is just getting more acute.

What is so special about Enterprise Search
It may appear that search is just search, no matter what is searched for and no matter within which pool of data, this is deeply misleading.
The difficulty of the task strongly depends on the users'expectations, on the implicit facilitating conditions embodied in the sources of information and amusingly (or not...) on the false apprehensions of excellence stemming from the lack of sound comparison basis in evaluating the results.
This last point is very well known, and since a long while, by all professionals having to dig thru knowledge databases, the fact that the Internet brought a wealth of previously hardly available data to a large public tends to obscure the fact the database queries have been and still are plagued by the infamous silence problem, not finding relevant data which is present.
Enterprise Search over corporate intranets is just the old database querying problem extended to the span and magnitude of Internet era infoglut, thus it inherits the worse of both worlds.
- It needs the accuracy of database queries, and better, over more data of more heterogenous and specialized subject domains.
- It needs the ranking capabilities on results which brought Google success, except with finer and customizable criteria.
- It needs access to a much larger variety of data formats than are commonly found on the web, including every fancy legacy formats that would hold valuable corporate informations.
- It needs access rights management, in order to encompass all of the enterprise knowledge while still ensuring appropriate levels of confidentiality.

No small feats...

Finding your way thru the hype
Most reports and news obey media rules. They target grabbing attention. They are light on substance that would be of value to decision makers.
IT consultants have primarily to sell their reports and news and it is much easier to "ride" on the buzz and fads of the day. This means grossly distorting the importance of relevant items and considerations.
Furthermore thinking and supputations are painful relative to the enthusiam and excitement of "cutting-edge solutions" readily available just around the corner. Everybody prefers to make it cheerfull and easy-looking.
Well, that may not be in your best interest. This is more infoglut in the guise of the noble purpose of helping combat infoglut.
I suggest another approach, a more intellectually demanding study could have a much better return on invested time.
Based on a lifelong experience in software I have tried to distilate the Critical factors that will make the difference in Enterprise Search to help you figure out what really matters for you to find your solution to Enterprise Search, but you will have to invest some of your time.

Some comments of early reviewers of the draft:

"Good luck with your papers. I expect they will be welcome by many people. They contain much gold."

"I think that you have a lot of interesting material in that paper, and it should be a good reference when you finish it."

"It dealt with with nearly every question I wondered about during my whole career as a librarian"

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Jean-Luc Delatre