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Reducing the “Pain” in Behind-the-Firewall Search

I received several interesting emails in the last 48 hours. I would like to share the details with you, but the threat of legal action dissuades me. The emails caused me to think about the “pain” that accompanies some behind-the-firewall search implementations. You probably have experienced some of these pains.

Item: fee-creep pain. What happens is that the vendor sends a bill that is greater than the anticipated amount. Meetings ensue, and in most cases, the licensees pay the bill. Cost over runs, in my experience, occur with depressing frequency. There are always reasonable explanations.

Item: complexity pain. Some systems get more convoluted with what some of my clients have told me is “depressing quickness.” With behind-the-firewall search nudging into middle age, is it necessary for systems to become more complicated, making it very difficult, if not impossible, for the licensee’s technical staff to make changes. One licensee of a well-known search system told me, “If we push in a button here, it breaks something over there. We don’t know how the system’s components interconnect.”

Item: relevancy pain. Here’s the scenario. You are sitting in your office and a user sends an email that says, “We can’t find a document that we know is in the system. We type in the name of the document, and we can’t find it.” In effect, users are baffled about the connection between their query and what the system returns as a relevant result. Now the hard part comes. The licensee’s engineer tries to tweak relevancy or hard wire a certain hit to appear at the top of the results list. Some systems don’t allow fiddling with the relevancy settings. Others offer dozens, three score, knobs and dials. Few or no controls, or too many controls — the happy medium is nowhere to be found.

Item: performance pain. The behind-the-firewall system churns through the training data. It indexes the identified servers. The queries come back in less than one second, blindingly fast for a behind-the-firewall network. Then performance degrades, not all at once. No, the system gets slower over time. How does one fix performance? The solution that our research suggests is the preferred one is more hardware. The budget is left gasping, but performance then degrades.

Item: impelling. Some vendors install a system. Before the licensee knows it, the vendor’s sales professional is touting an upgrade. One rarely discussed issue is that certain vendors upgrades — how shall I phrase it — often introduce issues. The zippy new feature is not worth the time, cost, and hassle of stabilizing a system or getting it back online. Search is becoming a consumer product with “new” and “improved” bandied freely among the vendor, PR professionals, tech journalists, and the licensees. Impelling for some vendors is where the profit is. So upgrades are less about the system and more about generating revenue.

The causes for each of these pressure points are often complicated. Many times the licensees are at fault. The customer is not always right when he or she opines, “Our existing hardware can handle the load.” Or, “We have plenty of bandwidth and storage.” Vendors can shade facts in order to make the sale with the hope of getting lucrative training, consulting, and support work. One vendor hires an engineer at $60,000 per year and bills that person’s time at a 5X multiple counting on 100 percent billability to pump more than $200,000 into the search firm’s pockets after paying salaries, insurance, and overhead. Other vendors are marketing operations, and their executives exercise judgment when it comes to explaining what the system can and can’t do under certain conditions.

What can be done about these pain points? The answer is likely to surprise some readers. You expect a checklist of six things that will convert search lemons into search lemonade. I am going to disappoint you. If you license a search system and install it on your organization’s hardware, you will experience pain, probably sooner rather than later. The reason is that most licensees underestimate the complexity, hardware requirements, and manual grunt work needed to get a behind-the-firewall system to deliver superior relevancy and precision. My advice is to budget so the search vendor does the heavy lifting. Also consider hosted or managed services. Appliances can reduce some of the aches as well. But none of these solutions delivers a trouble-free search solution.

There are organizations with search systems that work and customers who are happy. You can talk to these proud owners at the various conferences featuring case studies. Fast Search & Transfer hosts its own search conference so attendees can learn about successful implementations. You will learn some useful facts at these trade shows. But the best approach is to have search implementation notches on your belt. Installing and maintaining a search system is the best way to learn what works and what doesn’t. With each installation, you get more street smarts, and you know what you want to do to avoid an outright disaster. User groups have fallen from favor in the last decade. Customers can “wander off the reservation”, creating a PR flap in some situations. Due to the high level of dissatisfaction among users of behind-the-firewall search systems, it’s difficult to get detailed, timely information from a search vendor’s customers. Ignorance may keep some people blissfully happy.

Okay, users are unhappy. Vendors make it a bit of work to get the facts about their systems. Your IT team has false confidence in its abilities. You need to fall back on the basics. You know these as well as I do: research, plan, formulate reasonable requirements, budget, run a competitive bid process, manage, verify, assess, modify, etc. The problem is that going through these tasks is difficult and tedious work. In most organizations, people are scheduled to the max, or there’s too few people to do the work due to staff rationalizations. Nevertheless, a reliable behind-the-firewall search implementation takes work, a great deal of work. Shortcuts — on the licensee’s side of the fence or the vendor’s patch of turn — increase the likelihood of a problem.

Another practical approach is to outsource the search function. A number of vendors offer hosted or managed search solutions. You may have to hunt for vendors who offer these services, sometimes called subscription search. Take a look at Blossom Software.

Also, consider one of the up-and-coming vendors. I’ve been impressed with ISYS Search Software and Siderean Software. You may also want to take another look at the Thunderstone – EPI appliance or the Google Search Appliance. I think both of these systems can deliver a reliable search solution. Both vendors’ appliances can be customized and extended.

But even with these pragmatic approaches, you run a good chance of turning your ankle or falling on your face if you stray too far from the basics. Pain may not be avoidable, but you can pick your way through various search obstacles if you proceed in a methodical, prudent way.

Stephen Arnold, January 23, 2008

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