19 bullet points about the difference between enterprise and web search

Eric Lai wrote in this week’s Computerworld about “Why is enterprise search harder than Google Web search?” Highlights included:

• He described enterprise search as consisting mainly of a search box plus faceted searching, with maybe some automated tagging as well.
• He observed that off-page factors such as PageRank don’t work nearly as well in an enterprise as they do on the Web, and that manual tagging by enterprise users falls far short of closing the gap.
• He stumbled a bit compare/constrasting search engines and “structured” DBMS.
• He basically endorsed the worldview of Ali Riaz, late of FAST, now of Attivio.

On the whole, that’s not bad. If this were an easy subject to write about, I’d have explained it a lot more clearly in the past myself. OK. Let me get off my duff and give it a whirl now. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Attivio, Enterprise search, FAST, Google, Search and text storage | 12 Comments »

Attivio tries to do it all

When Andrew McKay was at FAST, I grumped about his search/BI integration story. Now that he’s trying to do the same thing at a startup called Attivio, it sounds more plausible.

Attivio is having a house party and product rollout in the latter part of January, and details are scarce in the mean time. But here are some highlights.

• Attivio was founded in August. It has 21 people and 1 VC. The VC has invested >$6 million and committed >$12 million total.
• Attivio has ambitious plans for a fully integrated data management/real-time BI stack. It’s currently called the “Active Intelligence Engine.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Attivio, BI integration, Investment research and trading, Lucene, Open source text analytics | 1 Comment »