Enterprise Search: The Good, the Bad, the Downright Ugly
May 17, 2008
Author’s Note: This essay is the basis for my conference end note, which I deliver on May 21, 2008. The venue is Information Today’s Enterprise Search Summit. The program committee has slotted me in the anchor position to provide an overview of what the more than 40 speakers said and to keep some attendees from rushing to the airport. The idea is that I am controversial and some vendors want to hear what I say so they can get the attorneys organized to write me threatening letters. My actual remarks are based on the essay below.
Yes, I am wearing bunny rabbit ears. I was going to put on my bikini, but at my lawyer told me, “You can be sued for assault.” I am wearing the ears.
The reason? A big wig at a large, really ethical pharmaceutical company–maybe that’s an oxymoron– told me that my 1980 picture on my Web log here was “unprofessional” and “disturbing”. Well, in 1980, when I talked to a group of executives, online search and data were unknown. Business executives are conservative, like the Roman ruler Caligula’s advisors. The ears broke the ice. Anyway, I’m not the one in hot water with the FDA. Maybe those guys should wear them?
Today (May 21, 2008) everyone in this room plus your friends and your children use online information services. A fat, old guy wearing bunny rabbit ears makes zero difference. You saw more interesting sights in Greenwich Village on your way to dinner, correct?
What is different about search today? It’s ubiquitous. Also, it is essentially unchanged. Here’s a screen shot of a system that displays information in an interesting way. Here’s a Google report. Sorry it’s in black and white, but I am a persona non grata at Google. I have to scour the open source literature to find out that the Googlers also know traditional search isn’t going to cut it moving forward.
What I learned at the conference, and I admit I could not sit through every session. I had to poke my head in and out of sessions. Feel free to push back if you disagree. Even better, I will pay you $2.00 (that’s my usual $1.00 adjusted for inflation.)
The Good
The speakers who prepared–Sue Feldman and Martin White–made the conference worthwhile. The speakers who recycled product literature and said, “I’m giving a product review” made the conference useful. I like product reviews. Also, I like the Google Search Appliance, probably because my son, Erik, would make my life miserable if I didn’t effuse Google goodness. I also like the systems I profile in my Beyond Search study, which you can buy from Frank Gilbane, a content impresario.
The Bad
Man, infomercials. I sit in a session. The speaker has an affiliation unrelated to a search vendor. The talk is the vendor’s sales pitch. These are a total waste of time, and the speakers should be sent to Toastmasters International or a remedial speech class. My view is that there are more of these “planted talks” than ever before. It’s a disturbing trend that I have seen at other conferences this year sponsored by other companies and with independent program committees. Not good.
The Ugly
I want to spend the remaining time on five points. Then I will pay $2.00 for a question. You can start thinking about the errors in my analysis now, and I don’t have any reluctance to let you pin me to the wall for my opinions.
- Talking about semantic search, Web 3.0, and text mining does not a business make. In fact, the whole PR blitz about “better search” leaves me cold. It’s not that these buzzwords don’t mean something. They do. The systems aren’t a leap forward.
- Enterprise search is a problem. The vendors can’t and won’t talk about their disasters. The licensees are often prohibited by the license terms from saying negative things about a system. My research, Jane Russell’s in Paris, Sinequa’s, and studies summarized for me by Martin White make one point: 60 to 70 percent of the users of Big Name search systems are dissatisfied. That’s not going to change as long as these companies sell systems that date from the late 1980s. On my blog I posted the tag lines for about two dozen vendors. The average age of the companies? 1997. Nothing new, folks. Nothing new.
- Google is a big deal in the enterprise, and I am getting tired of hearing people dismiss the company’s presence as trivial or an aberration. My sources reveal that Google is THE largest enterprise search vendor. The company has more than 9,500 GSA licensees. The company is struggling to deal with inquiries about geo spatial, hosted services, and other cloud-based products. Does Google tell me this? No, Google’s Larry Page remembers that he squabbled with me in 2000 at the Boston Search Engine Meeting, and he wants me put in the Smithsonian’s computing exhibit, locked in with the UNIVAC.
- Costs are not just a problem. The costs associated with enterprise search are going to be a major problem going forward. Data transformation can consume as much as 30 percent of an IT department’s budget. The customization costs of some enterprise search systems are so high that licensees can’t make a system better. Take a look at the pre-acquisition Verity. It was a services firm, not a search vendor. Now other vendors are going for this high margin business. Some enterprise search systems are designed to sell consulting.
- Scaling ain’t us. Most of the vendors whose systems I examine for my various reports and studies don’t scale gracefully. What does this mean? It means that a licensee has to throw hardware at a problem, figure out how to tune a complex system on a complicated Frankenstein infrastructure, and figure out how to make these changes without trashing the index and going back to square one. Some systems scale. Siderean, Exalead, Coveo, ISYS. I can’t name them all. What’s important is that none of the Big Names scale gracefully. Up-and-comers, profiled in Beyond Search–my new study–do a better job of this.
Wrap Up
So what did I learn? The marketing frenzy that infects so much of our information world has reached enterprise search. The vendors and their financial challenges make it tough to get the straight dope on search systems. Finally, people who volunteer to speak at conferences often spend little time creating a presentation that will knock the attendees’ socks off.
What did I like? I like the sector. It’s booming. There’s a lot a interesting stuff out there. Cluuz.com. Silobreaker. Look to the newer systems. Oh, don’t ignore Googzilla. Think surf on Googzilla.
Stephen Arnold, May 18, 2008
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