Enterprise search: What is it and where is it headed

Edward Ross, a solutions architect at the e-commerce search vendor Exorbyte, stresses a growing awareness among customers that “accessing data sources like address and product data often requires a different solution than classical full-text enterprise search solutions.” He views the future as including “more semantic understanding of both content and queries ... I see search engines handling more business process automation tasks based on the search index.”

Jordi Prats, CTO of Inbenta, approaches enterprise search from the perspective of artificial intelligence and natural language processing. He has learned that enterprise search “is often underestimated.” He adds, “Nowadays, the market is flooded with solutions that try to efficiently tackle enterprise search (sometimes enterprise CMS and search at the same time), but more often than not companies end up facing costly integrations which only provide partially effective results.”

Looking toward the future, Prats predicts, “On one hand, the future of search goes through natural language processing ... while on the other hand, it’ll entail the capability of providing advanced information analysis during indexation time ... The future of search still remains an enigma.”

The pace of change

John Felahi, chief strategy officer for Content Analyst Company, views enterprise search based on some of his experiences working at Microsoft. Content Analyst offers content processing technology based on technology originally developed by SAIC (saic.com) for use in selected U.S. government projects. Content Analyst licenses that technology to third parties and provides other services to organizations worldwide. He points to progress made by enterprise search vendors in machine learning and visualization. Looking toward the horizon, he senses that “search is following the path of business intelligence (BI) in terms of visualization, but hopefully search gets there at a much faster pace.”

Dixon Jones, marketing director of Majestic SEO sidesteps enterprise search and focuses on public Web indexing. For him, big data represents a milestone. He points out: “Big data solutions (and in particular MapReduce, a querying technology developed by Google) has really started to allow data to drive decision making and now also drive innovation. Finding insights that would previously have taken weeks or months of data crunching can now be completed on hours or minutes. This is very much at the route of the pace of change.”

For Jones, the future will merge Web search and document search. He says, “The information is out there … on Facebook, in public records, on LinkedIn. Search will be harnessing these data signals and driving much stronger insights based on big data patterns and predictions.”

More personal

Simon Bain, CEO of SearchYourCloud, has a background in extensible markup language, project management and security for use on interactive digital television employed for voting in the United Kingdom. His view of enterprise search is that it is “an industry in flux.” The problems he identifies in enterprise search include “the complexity of the interfaces and the lack of any real relevant information being returned.” The result is that users are moving to “more relevant applications and the fragmentation of search once again.” When he peers into the future, he responds to search becoming “more personal.”

Bain says, “With users being able to add and delete their own search sources, true federation will come in to play, and the ‘super index’ will start to take a back seat to ‘click-time’ information access. This change will mean that users gain power to control their own results, bringing in cloud stores, internal applications, such as CRM and doc management, as well as pulling in external non-corporate content from websites, such as Linked-In, Facebook and other social networks. This will then give the user a 100 percent view of their data and information points.”

DtSearch, a Microsoft-centric search vendor, provided information without attributing the company’s viewpoint to a particular person. dtSearch points out that “enterprise users expect instant concurrent search of all content-based data applications.” For this company, the future pivots on “cutting-edge implementations by independent programmers ... using extensible APIs.”

Docurated’s Gorbansky stresses that “enterprise search has had to redefine itself once again.” For him, the future makes enterprise search “essential.” Looking toward the future, he says, “Enterprise search will become instant and intuitive, paving the way for increased productivity across the enterprise.”

Author observations

Several observations occurred to me as I worked through the compilation of expert opinions in “Enterprise Search: 14 Industry Experts Predict the Future of Search”.

First, the confusion about what enterprise search is characterizes the experts’ approach to findability. A knowledge management professional would set about gathering other writings by these individuals and attempting to provide a context for their “information” and opinions. Without a knowledge framework, the collection of opinions is confusing.

Second, the selection of companies represented provides a wide spectrum of starting points. The inclusion of search engine optimization experts mixed with vendors of primary systems and component vendors provides a surprising consensus. Automation is likely to be more important with each passing day. Also, users want to be relieved of the burden of formulating a query or will be given systems that reduce the user’s dependence on keywords and formal queries. The approach is likely to be given considerable attention because automation reduces some of the costs associated with finding information. Will automated search provide knowledge management systems with appropriate inputs? If not, perhaps the discontinuity between enterprise search and knowledge management becomes another challenge for both disciplines to resolve.

Third, the vendors, with the sole exception of LTU in Paris, focus on text. The data about the volume of content by file type is not definitive. The need to be able to search audio, images and video within an organization is increasing. Videos posted on YouTube, Vimeo or other file sharing systems are proliferating. IBM creates big data podcasts each week, distributing them via Apple iTunes. Videos about search, content processing and analytics systems are key parts of the marketing efforts of Attensity, MarkLogic, Oracle and other firms. The future of enterprise search is more than text. The Docurated analysis makes clear that enterprise search vendors and experts may be their own worst enemy.

There may be some challenges for enterprise search in the organizations of tomorrow. Without innovation, enterprise search is likely to find itself marginalized as enterprise knowledge management solutions proliferate. Search without search may be shorthand for who needs old-fashioned search?