Worlds Apart: The Schism between Information Access and OId School Keyword Search
January 9, 2015
Ah, Dave Schubmehl. You may remember my adventures with this “expert” in search. He published four reports based on my research, and then without permission sold one of these recycled $3,500 gems on Amazon. A sharp eyed law librarian and my attorney were able to get this cat back into the back.
He’s back with a 22 page report “The Knowledge Quotient: Unlocking the Hidden Value of Information Using Search and Content Analytics” that is free. Yep, free.
I was offered this report at a Yahoo email address I use to gather the spam and content marketing fluff that floods to me each day. I received the spam from Alisa Lipzen, an inside sales representative, of Coveo. Ms. Lipzen is sufficiently familiar with me to call me “Ben”. That’s a familiarity that may be unwarranted. She wants me to “enjoy.” Okay, but how about some substance.
To put this report in perspective, it is free. To me this means that the report was written for Coveo (a SharePoint centric keyword search vendor) and Lexalytics (a unit of Infonic if this IDC item is accurate). IDC, in my view, was paid to write this report and then cooperated with Coveo and Lexalytics to pump out the document as useful information.
My interest is not in the content marketing and pay-for-fame methods of consulting firms and their clients. Nope. I am focused on the substance of the write up which I was able to download thanks to the link in the spam I received. Here’s the cover page.
For background, I have just finished CyberOSINT: Next Generation Information Access. Fresh in my mind are the findings from our original and objective research. That’s right. I funded the research and I did not seek compensation from any of the 21 companies profiled in the report. You can read about the monograph on my Xenky site.
What’s interesting to me is that the IDC “expert” generated marketing document misses the major shift that has taken place in information access.
Keyword search is based on looking at what happened. That’s the historical bias of looking for content that has been processed and indexed. One can sift through that index and look for words that suggest happiness or dissatisfaction. That’s the “sentiment” angle.
But these methods are retrospective.
As CyberOSINT points out the new approach that is gaining customers and the support of a number of companies like BAE and Google is forward looking.
One looks up information when one knows what one is seeking. But what does the real time flow of information mean for now and the next 24 hours or week. The difference is one that is now revolutionizing information access and putting old school vendors at a disadvantage.
But for IDC, Coveo, and Lexalytics, this shift is not part of the business model. The focus of the historical approach is something called “knowledge quotient.” I wrote about this in Beyond Search. IDC, however, continues to embrace what I think is a specious and vague view of what customers want from information access systems. You can read about the “research” conducted over a year ago on page 5 of the IDC report. Our cyber OSINT research is more current and, I believe, more accurate because my team was not working for a client.
IDC gets around to explaining what is up with Coveo and Lexalytics on page 13 of the free report. The guts of the argument is that Coveo and Lexalytics have teamed up to “understand” content. The report talks about the tie ups ability to “unlock the hidden value found in their data and content repositories.”
Exactly. Historical, look back, old school and out of step with the shift to real time and predictive content processing. Coveo and Lexalytics are bringing the past forward as knowledge. As the recent events in Paris show, the past is of interest, but the information needed is “now” information. The past is useful. But the focus of information access has shifted.
One looks back to the methods of Lewis and Clark, the compass, and the hand drawn map. The cyber OSINT approach looks forward to events that one needs to plan for and prepare for. Looking back is an academic exercise. Dealing with information today requires a different approach.
The capstone to this marketing oriented white paper is an injunction to “measure benefits.” Part of the problem with keyword search is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to show that licensing an enterprise search system delivers a bottom line impact. If those data were available, a simple table of numbers would be in the IDC “expert” report. Instead of concrete numbers, we get “knowledge” and other fuzzy concepts.
The point of my comparing the historical, old school, flintlock approach of IDC with the cyber OSINT approach is simple: Keyword search has become a utility. A perfectly good search system is available without charge from Elasticsearch or Flax. Understanding the meaning of language is a tricky business. That’s why the leaders in cyber OSINT use multiple methods in their near real time or real time processing of digital content.
In my opinion, forward looking organizations will want to pay attention to the information access solutions offered by the 21 vendors in CyberOSINT, not the two vendors in the IDC report.
I enjoy learning about Lewis and Clark and I enjoy historical search. But few would try to make decisions using the tools of these 19th century explorers. That’s why keyword search and historical look ups are less and less relevant today.
Stephen E Arnold, January 9, 2015
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