There’s also a small group of people who tend to be quieter about their expertise, perhaps because as independent practitioners or small business owners they’re not supported by the marketing budgets of large companies. These people survive on their reputation, which has been built steadily on a record of solid advice, honesty and neutrality. I’m now lucky enough to be part of this group – an informal network of experts in subjects as diverse as search for Sharepoint, intranet strategy and taxonomy management. Occasionally we collaborate on projects, often we recommend each other to our clients and it’s always hugely enjoyable to meet in person and discuss the latest trends and industry landscape. This informal network means Flax can offer more services to our clients – and if we can’t help, we probably know someone we trust who can.

So I’m very proud to announce that this group – the Search Network – are releasing a joint publication, Search Insights 2018. In this 70-page collection of essays you can learn how to research, procure, choose, budget, plan and run a search project in the best way for your business and your users.

Unlike some other industry reports, we’re not charging for this report, you won’t have to register or give us your email address, and it’s Creative Commons licensed so you can even redistribute it if you like (with attribution). There’s no sponsorship, no plotting of vendors on confusing trend diagrams, no marketing buzzwords or direct recommendations – after all, we’re independent. We welcome any feedback you have of course.

My personal thanks to Martin White who has led this effort and who has also written about the Network and the report.

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Our intention was to combine our skills and experience, drawn both from academia and industry, and create something that would be useful for both those interested in researching enterprise search (perhaps for a PhD) and those developing actual search systems. Once you’ve read the book itself there are over 20 pages of references (derived both from academia and industry) to follow up. Hopefully the book will complement Martin White’s seminal Enterprise Search (Martin has kindly reviewed it for us here).

Huge thanks must go of course to my co-author Udo, Mark Sanderson at Now Publishing, those who reviewed early drafts including Martin White and David Hawking and all those who have provided help and information. The book will be available in printed form at the SIGIR 2017 conference in Tokyo and the publishers have also made the entire book available for free download until July 29th. We would of course be very grateful for any feedback! We’re also planning some joint presentations this autumn to introduce the book.

We’d also like to hope that our book goes a little way towards explaining what is still a much misunderstood, over-hyped and over-sold field – as Martin writes today.

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