A search engine does not need to be exclusive of all other search engines, nor must it be deployed to crawl and index every single repository in its path to be referred to as enterprise search. There are good and justifiable reasons to leave select rep…

As many of you know from our press release at Gilbane Boston, two of the reports we will be publishing in the next few of months have to do with search. Lynda Moulton, who runs our Enterprise Search consulting practice……

The insight you expressed about the use and misuse of the term is telling of the crux of the problem. I think a lot of developers. like Circos, for example, have cleverly designed interfaces that are attractive, functional and appealing. That on top of the choice of sources they are indexing is interesting and obviously marketable. Still, I think you would agree, the indexing is largely by keyword and the search techniques are matching strings in the index. This is the predominant search technique; stemming is used to help the coverage. Even information-theoretic search techniques boil down to a bag of words, so all of them suffer from the same malady of superficiality.

You must have heard of the independence assumption in information science. This is the cause of search affliction, in my opinion. And this is the source of the disconnect between what people are searching for and what search engines find for them.

If this continues to be the case, computers will not become intelligent allies in weeding through the stagnating pile of useless trivia. If the search is to be so robotic as to be useless, I wouldn’t want my computer calling me with stupid messages it guesses are interesting to me.

Also, of interest to you Stephan, might be another perspective on semantic search, one that is not tied to NLP. This approach is unique as it maps text using the semantics of interpersonal relationships. Take a look at my blog for more on that.

Finally, I think search is widely recognized as the next application platform. Google’s present portfolio and business and Microsoft’s and IBM’s obvious investments in their search products show that big business thinks that way. I think Google secretly enjoys that it is not easy. The big players have shown that you do not need to understand search to make money in advertising, you just need to field the product and be there for the advertisers. Faster is better, its a zipity-zip world. They all want you to buy right now, make your choice instantly.

I don’t see it changing soon. Critical thinking takes time. Understanding search takes time. Understanding your choices from a search engine takes time and exegesis. Hardly no one wants to take the time for that.

-Ken Ewell