Search requirements and asking the right questions

When we're contacted by potential clients, we have to gather as much information as possible about how and why they need search technology. This either takes the form of a physical or telephone meeting and much scribbling in notebooks, or a long exchange of emails. In all cases there are some important questions that must be answered, and I thought it might be useful to list the most common ones here: How many items do you need to search? The number of items to search varies w...Continue reading

Not so FAST…

Microsoft have announced a roadmap for their enterprise search products: none of this is very surprising. How successful they'll be at integrating the FAST technology (which comes from a Linux background) with Sharepoint, .NET etc. remains to be seen. They've also released an 'Express' (i.e., free but feature limited) version of Microsoft Search Server...Continue reading