Finding meaning in search

Search remains a vital element in knowledge management. Although it is a mature technology, it is also still evolving. "Search is where databases were in the 1990s," Fletcher says. "In the next decade, we expect to see search attain similar reliability and precision."    

Open Source Search

The LucidWorks platform from Lucid Imagination is a commercial version of Apache Lucene/Solr, an open source search platform. "Enterprise acceptance of open source software continues to grow," says Grant Ingersoll, chief scientist at Lucid Imagination. "More organizations are using the LucidWorks platform to develop search applications and to integrate content across the enterprise at the user interface level."

Another trend that Ingersoll cites is the opportunity for search technology to be the user interface for real-time analytics for big data. "The iterative process of search, discovery and analytics fits in with big data," he says. "Search can enhance the performance of big data analytics helping to target subsets of relevant information. In addition, search runs natively on Hadoop, can scale to the big data environment and can accommodate the structured and unstructured data within the Hadoop file system."

In January, Lucid Imagination launched LucidWorks Cloud. "By standing up the application in the cloud, customers do not have to worry about infrastructure," Ingersoll explains. "They bring in their data and scale up as needed." One business and financial management software firm is using LucidWorks cloud to support customers in their search for information about taxes. Since LucidWorks supports ratings and recommendations, customers can find out which answers have been helpful to others.