Attivio Scientist on the Changes in Enterprise Search
November 3, 2008
If you are looking for a summary of some of the changes forced upon vendors of enterprise search systems, you will enjoy “Beyond Findability: The Search for Active Intelligence.” The article is the work of Attivio’s Jonathan Young, an engineer and inventor who works at Attivio. I interviewed Attivio’s founder Ali Riaz here in May 2008. I have noticed that the word “beyond” is becoming shorthand for explaining that there is more needed than key word retrieval, Google, or business intelligence that requires a PhD in statistics to figure out.
“Beyond” also signals dissatisfaction with most search, content processing, and text analysis systems. The point, according to Mr. Young is that some innovations like semantic search impose significant burdens on an organization in machine resources and time.
The fix, he asserts here, is to provide “unified information access.” The idea is to make it easy to access data in a database table with unstructured information in an email. Mr. Young asserts:
The good news is that the predicted convergence of the database and search worlds is leading to some significant improvements in the search experience. As we move beyond the search box (the “user interface of last resort”), enterprise search solutions are beginning to support many different search modalities, including exploratory search, information discovery, and information synthesis. Navigation solutions are multiplying. Faceted search is already commonplace at major e-commerce sites.
If you want to move “beyond findability”, you can get a glimpse of the future by looking at the Attivio Web site. Has the future of search finally arrived. I think the newer systems are moving in the right direction, and progress is being made. I am encouraged that vendors are adapting to user needs. That’s encouraging. Even more interesting to me is that Mr. Young hits upon many of the themes that I have been addressing in this Web log, making “beyond” a candidate for a code word to mean that traditional key word retrieval is not enough for today’s knowledge worker.
Stephen Arnold, November 2, 2008
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