Predictions

A new year, and a chance to think about what might happen in the world of enterprise search over the next twelve months. I’ll make a stab at some predictions:

1. Price cuts – possibly driven by even harsher competition between Google and Microsoft FAST, I can see prices coming down for packaged enterprise search. Autonomy will probably raise theirs
2. Real time search matures – not just Twitter or Facebook, but real time data from many sources being part of enterprise search results
3. More geolocation-aware search – in the U.K. at least, we’re seeing signs that the source data is finally being freed up, which should make it a lot simpler and cheaper to build location-aware solutions
4. A few less second-tier players in the market – it’s still difficult out there, I’m afraid not every company will survive the next year.

You’re welcome to take any of these with a generous pinch of salt!

Performance metrics

Stephen Arnold recently posted some rather impressive performance figures for Autonomy’s IDOL search engine. This kind of data is all very well, but without independent testing and more detail it’s hard to know how these figures apply to the real world.

So here’s an idea. Why not create an openly available collection of test data, a set of searches and a set of conditions, then compare the performance of the various available engines for indexing and searching? Recording the software and hardware used as well, of course. Making the data and conditions public would allow for independent verification.

I’m not sure commercial search vendors would ever agree to this, but it’s a nice idea.