Google White Paper: Universal Search
January 7, 2009
Most companies write long white papers. Not the GOOG. The company embraces brevity in its universal search marketing document. In fact, the best way to handle an uninformed journalist is to be silent. Writing an equation is also good. I call this universal brevity.
A Google white paper PR blitz is choking my newsreader. You can download your own copy of a tiny print, four-page white paper about universal search. Here’s the link I used to get the white paper.
The single technical illustration in the Google white paper. Enterprise search cannot become much easier, right?
Now what’s in the four-page white paper? Here are the highlights in my opinion:
- Lots of data without much supporting documentation to indicate that employees want to find information from multiple sources. The fix is “universal search”. A categorical affirmative finds its way into the first page, a sure sign that no mathematician read this argument.
- Universal search is not tailored to each user. The idea is personalization via groups.
- The benefits are pretty much the same benefits one can find in the marketing collateral of the more than 300 vendors who provides search and content processing to organizations. But there is one big difference. The system is from Google, and with about 75 percent of the Web search market, Google means search. This is pure Buyology in action.
- Happy customer, in this case, Stratus Technologies. The GOOG is allowing happy customers to talk. No surprise here. What’s interesting is that you can gin up an interesting customer list of the Google Search Appliance using my Overflight service and the Exalead entity extraction system that is available.
Should you download this paper? Absolutely. Believe me. Procurement teams hear from their constituents, “We want search to work like Google.” Whether you think the Google enterprise search system is fair or foul (no, not fowl), that’s irrelevant. Market share translates to mind share. People want their Google. Someone wrote me today and said that my assertion that Google could not be stopped in 2009.
The 360 degree approach in universal search. Is this role based information access? If so, is Google breaking new ground or following a well-worn path? I vote for the well-worn path.
As an official addled goose, I have to state that I don’t see IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, or SAP as putting up much of a fight. Autonomy is fighting hard. Exalead is making wins. Coveo is growing. Is any company actively thwarting Googzilla? No, in my opinion. By the way, I have held this view since 2003 and first stated it publicly in The Google Legacy which appeared in 2005. Download the white paper because in the enterprise, your colleagues will be reading this stuff as coming from the mouth of the GOOG (not God, the GOOG. That’s Google’s ticker symbol).
As Google begins its run up to its annual gathering of the enterprise sales faithful, watch for more of this “official” output from the company.
Stephen Arnold, January 7, 2008
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