Enterprise Search Is Not Web Search — A Revelation
December 28, 2008
I saw a link to a survey about enterprise search. I clicked around and found a snippet about the survey in a UK Web site called ITPro.co.uk. Here’s the passage that caught my attention:
In small and medium enterprises in the UK, a YouGov survey this summer found 80 per cent of managers and directors waste up to an hour a day looking for documents. And according the same HP survey, 60 per cent of IT managers spend “a high proportion of their time” dealing with employee requests for help finding basic information on the network.
You can read the full write up here, but the survey which I think is more significant than the discussion of the differences between enterprise and and Intranet search helps pin down the costs of manual information retrieval and the alleged savings from a successful search deployment. But I did read the full write up.
The article “Why Enterprise Search Is Not Intranet Search” by Mary Branscombe tilled ground that I thought had long ago be tamed. Guess not. Ms. Branscombe runs through some of the familiar vendors, but she spends most of her time on the Recommind system. Recommind is a system that strikes me as similar to Autonomy’s. Recommind cut its teeth in eDiscovery. The company has branched out into enterprise search, and the company has been gaining some traction in the US.
The point in the article that surprised me was the negative spin given to the Google Search Appliance. I am not confident that either the sources Ms. Branscombe consulted or Ms. Branscombe herself has a strong sense of what one can do with the OneBox API. Traditional vendors have not been able to match Google’s 25,000 plus Google Search Appliance licenses. Google is shifting from an appliance only approach and broadening its offering to include some variants.
Check out the article. Let me know if you agree with my assessment.
Stephen Arnold, December 28, 2008
Comments
6 Responses to “Enterprise Search Is Not Web Search — A Revelation”
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
Doesn’t do much for me. One of the companies I’m working with at the moment is asking for an enterprise search that is more like Google. The problem that they and other organisations face, which Mary Branscombe doesn’t address, is that internal file structures and file metadata is usually a mess. None of the semantic/Bayesian tools can perform magic as far as I’m aware
One of the problem I believe is that people are expecting more out of search (help with BI, make executive decision, make coffee.. etc etc) whilst at the sametime want it to be easier to use than ever.
Whilst search technology have come a long way, everyday people and general business users’ skill and understanding of the underlying technology have not been kept up to date.
When all we had to edit text was a notepad, everybody could easily use it to do what it was suppose to do. With the power of Microsoft word and excel, we are expect to be able to do a lot more with it, hence the need for training and practice. Why is this this the case with Search ?
Technology is only part of the problem.
Felix,
People continue to muddle technology. SkyNet may change that.
Stephen Arnold, December 29, 2008
I am sure skynet is being worked on as part of the 20% spare time at Google. Might not be called Goognet though…..
[…] http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/2008/12/28/enterprise-search-is-not-web-search-a-revelation/ […]
Great Article! Thanks for shareing.