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...Continue reading

Big Data – It's not always big and it's not always clever

There's been a recent flurry of activity from search vendors (and those larger companies that have been buying them) around the theme of Big Data, which has become the fashionable marketing term for a sheaf of technologies including search, machine learning, Map Reduce and for scalability in general. If anyone impertinently asks why co...Continue reading

The Fall and rise of search in a world of Big Data – part 2

The theme of Big Data continued at the next conference I attended, the first Enterprise Search Europe held in London. There was a good mix of presentations ranging from the academic to the practical, my favourite probably being Martin Belam and colleague's talk about using Solr to dynamically generate content for the ne...Continue reading

Is Enterprise Search dead? No, but it's changing…

I spent yesterday morning at Ovum's briefing on Enterprise Search, and they kindly invited me to sit on a discussion panel. One of the more controversial topics raised by analyst Mike Davis was 'Is Enterprise Search dead?' which provoked some lively discussion. We also heard from Tyler Tate of Twigkit on Search UX, Exalead on Search Based Applications and Continue reading

Mixed reactions as HP buys Autonomy

The blogotweetosphere has been positively buzzing since last night's announcement that Hewlett Packard will be buying Autonomy for £7.1bn, while divesting itself of its PC business. Many commentators have put a positive spin on this, pointing to Autonomy's meteoric rise from a small office in Cambridge to the behemoth it is today....Continue reading

Chalk and cheese – the difficulty of analysing open source options

David Fishman of Lucid Imagination has blogged on how open source search is treated by the analyst community (you can even use his links to get hold of some of the reports mentioned for the usual price of your contact details). We can add to his list a report from the Real Story Group<...Continue reading