Commentary--It seems as though there is a watershed event in the search industry every ten years or so. Although Lexis-Nexis first commercialized search in the 1970s, it took a decade of indexing advances such as skip lists and index compression to make indexing practical, and another decade of computing advances to give us billions of searchable documents on the Internet.
Ten years ago, Google totally changed the face of what was then the emerging concept of Web search using better ranking algorithms based on website popularity. This precipitated the bifurcation of the search market into two segments: Web search and enterprise search. As the Web search space came to be dominated by Google, the old guard (e.g. Verity, Autonomy, AltaVista, and FAST) turned to enterprise search.
Google brought two changes to the industry. First, it raised the standard and importance of ease of use for the end user. By establishing the search box standard for the Web, it set the bar for enterprise search as well. Enterprise search in general does not have a strong track record: stories of multi-year deployments, cost overruns, and dissatisfied users are rife in the community.
Second, Google brought search to the forefront of information access as a strategy in the enterprise. The statement, Why cant I find information in my company as easy as I can find it on Google? became all too common, echoing from the cubicles of knowledge workers. The average knowledge worker uses Google search more than their own internal knowledge applications. Not surprising, perhaps, there are signs that the enterprise search market is entering another watershed:
Significant dissatisfaction with current solutions: according to AIIM, 85 percent of respondents in a recent survey said findability is significantly critical to their organizations goals and success, yet 85 percent also said less than 50 percent of their enterprise information is searchable online.
Increased innovation: especially in data transformation, analysis, and visualization.
Unmet potential: current estimates state that more than 80 percent of corporate information assets reside in unstructured content sources, including contracts, white papers, research documents, emails, PDFs, and beyond, yet 75 percent of IT resources are dedicated to structured data.
Increased mergers and acquisitions: business intelligence and data warehousing (BI/DW) vendors are purchasing search and analytics technologies (SAP/Pilot) while search vendors are buying analytical applications (Autonomy/Zantaz). Some of the largest acquisitions in the software industry have occurred in the last 15 months (SAP/Business Objects, IBM/Cognos, Microsoft/FAST).
Industry convergence: analysts are heralding the convergence of enterprise search with business intelligence as the ultimate answer to unified information access.
Legacy architectures: attempts to bend search engines to accept structured data and to force databases to understand unstructured content have both proven to be failed approaches. Most legacy enterprise search engines (such as the AltaVista toolkit) were built from the same code base as the web search engines, and until recently, the fundamental technology used in search engines had not changed for decades.
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