Search Certification
April 1, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who told me about the new AIIM search certification program. Now that will be an interesting development. AIIM is a group anchored in the original micrographics business. The organization has morphed over the years, and it now straddles a number of different disciplines. The transition has been slow and in some cases directed by various interest groups from the content management sector and consulting world. CMS experts have produced some major problems for indexing subsystems, and the CMS vendors themselves seem to generate more problems for licensees than their systems resolve. (Click here for one example.)
This is not an April’s Fool joke.
The notion of search certification is interesting for five reasons:
First, there is no widely accepted definition of search in general or enterprise search in particular. I have documented the shift in terminology used by vendors of information retrieval and content processing systems. You can see the lengths here to which some organizations go to avoid using the word “search”, which has been devalued and overburdened in the last three or four years. The issue of definitions becomes quite important, but I suppose in the quest for revenue, providing certification in a discipline without boundaries fulfills some folks’s ambitions for revenue and influence.
Second, the basic idea of search–that is, find information–has shifted from the old command line Boolean to a more trophy-generation approach. Today’s systems are smart, presumably because the users are either too busy to formulate a Boolean query or view the task as irrelevant in a Twitter-choked real time search world. The notion of “showing” information to users means that a fundamental change has taken place which moves search to the margins of this business intelligence or faceted approach to information.
Third, the Google “I’m feeling doubly lucky” invention US2006/0230350 I described last week at a conference in Houston, Texas, removes the need to point and click for information. The Google engineers responsible for “I’m feeling doubly lucky” remove the user from doing much more than using a mobile device. The system monitors and predicts. The information is just there. A certification program for this approach to search will be most interesting because at this time the knowledge to pull off “I’m feeling doubly lucky” resides at Google. If anyone certifies, I suppose it would be Google.
Fourth, search is getting ready to celebrate its 40th birthday if one uses Dr. Salton’s seminal papers as the “official” starting point for search. SQL queries, Codd style, preceded Dr. Salton’s work with text, however. But after 40 years certification seems to be coming a bit late in the game. I can understand certification for a specific vendor’s search system–for example, SharePoint–but I think the notion of tackling a broader swath of this fluid, boundaryless space is logically uncomfortable for me. Others may feel more comfortable with this approach whose time apparently has come.
Finally, search is becoming a commodity, finding itself embedded and reshaped into other enterprise applications. Just as the “I’m feeling doubly lucky” approach shifts the burden of search from the user to the Google infrastructure, these embedded functions create a different problem in navigating and manipulating dataspace.
I applaud the association and its content management advisors for tackling search certification. My thought is that this may be an overly simplistic solution to a problem that has shifted away from the practical into the realm of the improbable.
There is a crisis in search. Certification won’t help too much in my opinion. Other skills are needed and these cannot be imparted in a boot camp or a single seminar. Martin White and I spent almost a year distilling our decades of information retrieval experience into our Successful Enterprise Search Management.
The longest journey begins with a single step. Looks like one step is about to be taken–four decades late. Just my opinion, of course. The question now becomes, “Why has no search certification process been successful in this time interval?” and “Why isn’t there a search professional association?” Any thoughts?
Stephen Arnold, March 31, 2009
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[…] Search Certification : Beyond Search First, there is no widely accepted definition of search in general or enterprise search in particular. I have documented the shift in terminology used by vendors of information retrieval and content processing systems. You can see the lengths here to which some organizations go to avoid using the word “search”, which has been devalued and overburdened in the last three or four years. The issue of definitions becomes quite important, but I suppose in the quest for revenue, providing certification in a discipline without boundaries fulfills some folks’s ambitions for revenue and influence. (tags: enterprisesearch searchengine informationaccess) […]
[…] Search Certification : Beyond Search First, there is no widely accepted definition of search in general or enterprise search in particular. I have documented the shift in terminology used by vendors of information retrieval and content processing systems. You can see the lengths here to which some organizations go to avoid using the word “search”, which has been devalued and overburdened in the last three or four years. The issue of definitions becomes quite important, but I suppose in the quest for revenue, providing certification in a discipline without boundaries fulfills some folks’s ambitions for revenue and influence. (tags: enterprisesearch searchengine informationaccess) […]