The death of enterprise search is reported, again

There’s no doubt that the search market has been in turmoil for many months now: traditional, closed source vendors are either frantically repositioning to avoid the ‘juggernaut that is Apache’s Solr/Lucene project’ or attempting to bore customers to death with Powerpoint. Our sources tell us that in the UK at least, sales of most closed source search engines have flatlined – not at all surprising when freely available alternatives exist. Luckily there are some parts of the sector with some energy: Attivio (with $34m of new funding to spend) and Lucidworks are still working hard on their search products, but even these rely heavily on an open source core.

Enter a company without any history or experience in the search market, Huddle, with a tired message about the death of Enterprise Search. I’m not entirely sure what the point of this article is, but apparently the lack of contextual information is the problem – “You have to do research in 50 places — email, Web, C-drives, the cloud, even inside people’s heads.”. I look forward to a brain-compatible indexing tool! There’s also the misassumption that what works for the wider consumer-focused Web will work for the enterprise – Amazon.com, Google and the iPad/iPhone are all namechecked. Enterprise data simply isn’t like web or consumer data – it’s characterised by rarity and unconnectedness rather than popularity and context.

Unfortunately in most enterprises simply sprinkling on social or collaborative features will not fix the most common search problems: a mishmash of unconnected legacy systems, unreliable and inconsistent metadata, a complex and untested security model (at least within the context of being able to search for everything, for example your bosses’ salary) and usually the lack of a dedicated team responsible for search. Enterprise Search is hard and few projects get beyond basic indexing of filestores and databases, let along adding in more people-focused features.

I couldn’t find much about search on Huddle’s website, but what I did find implied that information must first be extracted from existing legacy systems and stored centrally. If you can manage this, preserving a consistent metadata model, coping with legacy formats, preserving full security and coping with updates then search should be relatively simple to implement on the resulting central store; however the devil is as ever in the detail.

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