Enterprise Search Problems: Why NGIA Systems Push Beyond Traditional Information Access Methods
January 29, 2015
Enterprise search has been useful. However, the online access methods have changed. Unfortunately, most enterprise search systems and the enterprise applications based on keyword and category access have lagged behind user needs.
The information highway is littered with the wrecks of enterprise search vendors who promised a solution to findability challenges and failed to deliver. Some of the vendors have been forgotten by today’s keyword and category access vendors. Do you know about the business problems that disappointed licensees and cost investors millions of dollars? Are you familiar with Convera, Delphes, Entopia, Fulcrum Technologies, Hakia, Siderean Software, and many other companies.
A handful of enterprise search vendors dodged implosion by selling out. Artificial Linguistics, Autonomy, Brainware, Endeca, Exalead, Fast Search, InQuira, iPhrase, ISYS Search Software, and Triple Hop were sold. Thus, their investors received their money back and in some cases received a premium. The $11 billion paid for Autonomy dwarfed the billion dollar purchase prices of Endeca and Fast Search and Transfer. But most of the companies able to sell their information retrieval systems sold for much less. IBM acquired Vivisimo for about $20 million and promptly justified the deal by describing Vivisimo’s metasearch system as a Big Data solution. Okay.
Today a number of enterprise search vendors walk a knife edge. A loss of a major account or a misstep that spooks investors can push a company over the financial edge in the blink of an eye. Recently I noticed that Dieselpoint has not updated its Web site for a while. Antidot seems to have faded from the US market. Funnelback has turned down the volume. Hakia went offline.
A few firms generate considerable public relations noise. Attivio, BA Insight, Coveo, and IBM Watson appear to be competing to become the leaders in today’s enterprise search sector. But today’s market is very different from the world of 2003-2004 when I wrote the first of three editions of the 400 page Enterprise Search Report. Each of these companies is asserting that their system provides business intelligence, customer support, and traditional enterprise search. Will any of these companies be able to match Autonomy’s 2008 revenues of $600 million. I doubt it.
The reason is not the availability of open source search. Elasticsearch, in fact, is arguably better than any of the for fee keyword and concept centric information retrieval systems. The problems of the enterprise search sector are deeper.
I discuss these issues in depth in CyberOSINT: Next Generation Information Access. The book is now available for purchase at www.xenky.com/cyberosint. I want to provide a few of the reasons why traditional enterprise search is not the solution to information access for many organizations. The full discussion of these problems and the solutions NGIA systems provide appears in the first chapter “Horses or Helicopters” of the 170 page study.
The idea is that traditional enterprise search no matter how expansive the explanation of today’s vendors is a horse; that is, an older approach to exploring a landscape for information. The horse sort of works when there is time, manpower, resources, and skilled explorers.
But helicopters are needed. These provide a high level view, can move to different distances to inspect key information peaks, and permit a landing for an up close inspection of items of interest. Who today wants to look for digital information on horseback. I do, but the time pressures make horseback an unacceptable alternative. That’s the problem with traditional information retrieval systems. The horse is useful, but it is not suited to today’s findability tasks. Enter the helicopter.
But there are some specific points of weakness. I discuss 12 items in CyberOSINT. Let me mention three of the 12 differences our research identified. You will need to purchase the book to get the other nine points.
- Each hit in a keyword or concept generated list creates work for the user. The idea is that the user has to read the list, click on promising titles, scan or read the document, locate the needed information, and then copy it to another document. Finally, the user has to look at the individual items gathered from a single result list and figure out what’s important and what’s not. If there is ambiguity or uncertainty, the user gets to repeat the horse ride through the particular information landscape. Few have the backside toughness to endure multiple horseback journeys through difficult information terrain. An NGIA system delivers actionable information in presentations that meet the needs and preferences of a user. This is an important difference.
- Indexing in keyword and concept centric systems rely of keywords. The keywords can be generalized and clustering can group related words. But the user has to know the words or concept phrases that pertain to the specific topic under investigation. In today’s enterprise, there are system users who find the vocabulary required to get specific information unfamiliar or in some cases ambiguous. NGIA systems deliver consumable outputs. In CyberOSINT, the outputs of more than 20 systems are presented. None of these is a results list. That is a significant departure from the technology that underpins most of today’s enterprise search systems.
- Traditional systems require the user to know which search system to use; for example, is the information in Salesforce.com, Outlook, or an Oracle database. The user may be confronted with different interfaces and different search syntaxes. NGIA systems focus on fusion of content. Furthermore, smart software presents information germane to the user’s need without the tedious, expensive manual tailoring of a personalization. Endeca, for example, can present what looks like an NGIA output. But the output requires humans to build a collection, code the outputs, and maintain the system. NGIA systems rely on automation for the majority of these tasks.
There are nine other key differentiators. If you want to learn why traditional enterprise search has become a low value commodity, you will want to read the “Horses or Helicopters” chapter in CyberOSINT.
Remember. There is a companion Telestrategies seminar on CyberOSINT. Information about the program is available at the Telestrategies Web site. The seminar is designed for law enforcement and intelligence professionals. But the conference organizer has a few slots left for those in other business sectors.
Stephen E Arnold, January 29, 2015
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