Enterprise search
Analysis of enterprise-specific search technology (as opposed to general web search). Related subjects include:
Lynda Moulton prefers enterprise search products that get up and running quickly
Lynda Moulton, to put it mildly, disagrees with the Gartner Magic Quadrant analysis of enterprise search. Her preferred approach is captured in:
Coveo, Exalead, ISYS, Recommind, Vivisimo, and X1 are a few of a select group that are marking a mark in their respective niches, as products ready for action with a short implementation cycle (weeks or months not years).
By way of contrast, Lynda opines:
Autonomy and Endeca continue to bring value to very large projects in large companies but are not plug-and-play solutions, by any means. Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft offer search solutions of a very different type with a heavy vendor or third-party service requirement. Google Search Appliance has a much larger installed base than any of these but needs serious tuning and customization to make it suitable to enterprise needs.
In particular, her views about FAST (now Microsoft) are scathing.
| Categories: Coveo, Enterprise search, FAST, Microsoft, Search engines | Leave a Comment |
Attivio update
I talked w/ Andrew McKay of Attivio for 2 ½ hours Thursday. I’ve also been working with some Attivio engineers on a blog search engine. I think it’s time to post about Attivio. 
| Categories: Application areas, Attivio, Enterprise search, Lucene, Structured search | 6 Comments |
One overview of e-discovery
I just found a year-old (almost) blog post from EMC executive Andrew Cohen that succinctly lays out his view (which he believes to mainly be a consensus stance) on e-discovery. Cohen is evidently both a lawyer and a honcho in document management system vendor EMC’s Compliance Division, which is probably relevant to interpreting his outlook, in the spirit of the old Kennedy School dictum that “Where you stand depends upon where you sit.”
Highlights included:
- Information management is central to e-discovery.
- In particular, auditability (my word) is central, if you want electronic documents to hold up as evidence in court.
- Search is good enough, but it’s not the biggest issue in e-discovery.
- E-mail archiving has reached the tipping point, and is increasingly a must-have, largely for its e-discovery benefits.
| Categories: E-discovery, Enterprise search | Leave a Comment |
How good does e-discovery search need to be?
Two years ago, CEO Mike Lynch of Autonomy tried to persuade me that Autonomy was and would remain dominant in the e-discovery search market because: Read more
| Categories: Autonomy, E-discovery, Enterprise search, Search engines | 1 Comment |
The Attivio angle on the FAST story
Attivio CEO Ali Riaz was previously CFO and COO of FAST. He tried to avoid involvement in the recent expose’ of his former employer. For his troubles he got a parking lot ambush, a big photograph, and some unflattering coverage. Read more
| Categories: Attivio, Enterprise search, FAST | 1 Comment |
Recent reporting on the shenanigans at FAST
A Norwegian newspaper did an expose’ on FAST, dated June 28. Helpful search industry participants quickly distributed English translations to a variety of commentators, including me. TechCrunch posted a scan of part of the article.
The gist is that FAST followed a pattern very common in the packaged enterprise software industry: Read more
| Categories: Enterprise search, FAST, Search engines | 1 Comment |
6 trends that could shake up the text analytics market
My last two posts were based on the introductory slide to my talk The Text Analytics Marketplace: Competitive landscape and trends. I’ll now jump straight ahead to the talk’s conclusion.
Text analytics vendors participate in the same trends as other software and technology vendors. For example, relational business intelligence and data warehousing products are increasingly being sold to departmental buyers. Those buyers place particularly high value on ease of installation. And golly gee whiz, both parts of that are also true in text mining.
But beyond such general trends, I’ve identified six developments that I think could radically transform the text analytics market landscape. Indeed, they could invalidate the neat little eight-bucket categorization I laid out in the prior post. Each is highly likely to occur, although in some cases the timing remains greatly in doubt.
These six market-transforming trends are:
- Web/enterprise/messaging integration
- BI integration
- Universal message retention
- Portable personal profiles
- Electronic health records
- Voice command & control
| Categories: BI integration, Enterprise search, Google, Microsoft, Search engines, Social software and online media, Text mining | 1 Comment |
The Text Analytics Marketplace: Competitive landscape and trends
As I see it, there are eight distinct market areas that each depend heavily on linguistic technology. Five are off-shoots of what used to be called “information retrieval”:
1. Web search
2. Public-facing site search
3. Enterprise search and knowledge management
4. Custom publishing
5. Text mining and extraction
Three are more standalone:
6. Spam filtering
7. Voice recognition
8. Machine translation
How text search has evolved over the past 15 years
I just stumbled across a brilliant summary of evolution in text search technology, written four years ago. It’s equally valid today (which in itself says something). I found it on the Prism Legal blog, but the actual author is Sharon Flank. My own comments are interspersed in bold. Read more
| Categories: Enterprise search, Ontologies, Search engines, Structured search | Leave a Comment |
Google could dominate single-site search
Google has begun to introduce a feature whereby, if your search obviously leads you to a single site (e.g., you searched on a company name), you get a second search box to search only within that site. More details at Google and Search Engine Land. Basically, this is Google Site Search made a lot easier to use.
I think this could be a really big deal. Read more
| Categories: Enterprise search, Google, Search engines, Specialized search | 4 Comments |
