Enterprise Search Europe 2012 – Big Data, search surveys and some FUD from Google

I visited Enterprise Search Europe for the first day only last week, and caught a number of the presentations as well as giving one of my own (which I won’t discuss here but you’ll hear more about over the next few weeks). First up was Paul Doscher of Lucid Imagination with a lively presentation discussing whether search is either dead or now a commodity, or whether search on Hadoop is the new killer app for the emerging world of Big Data. We then had Kristian Norling from Findwise with some initial results from their survey on enterprise search – some interesting numbers here such as ‘18.5% of users are mostly/very satisfied with search’ and only ‘6% have a search strategy although 46% are planning one’ – we hear that Kristian is hoping to make the survey an annual one, which will be a great resource for anyone in the industry.

Matt Mullen, fuelled by diet cola, gave an introduction to search with a key point – that enterprise search usually performs a role within a workflow or task – a fact often ignored. Runar Buvik of Searchdaimon talked about a great resource he has developed comparing search engines, which can give some often amusing contrasts between different technologies, with some insisting there are no results for a particular query while others find thousands. I also enjoyed Emma Bayne and Donald Phillips polished presentation on the search facilities at the National Archives – interestingly although Autonomy is currently powering their search they are considering open source alternatives.

The day concluded with a presentation from Matt Eichner of Google, who turned up with their own film crew. You can read much of what he said at Computer World. I’m afraid I didn’t enjoy this presentation very much – it talked down to the audience and contained a lot of FUD around open source (surprising when Google uses and supports so much of it) – complete with sympathy-garnering pictures of babies in incubators and silly analogies about how one should prefer to fly in the airplane that cost the most. I hadn’t realised until his talk that the Google Search Appliance appears to be made of cheese!

It was great to network and catch up, and I hope next year to be able to attend the whole event. Thanks to all the organisers especially Martin White of Intranet Focus.

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