The Law of Moore: Is Information Retrieval an Exception?
April 17, 2015
I read “Moore’s Law Is Dead, Long Live Moore’s Law.” The “law” cooked up by a chip company suggests that in technology stuff gets better, faster, and cheaper.” With electronic brains getting, better, faster, cheaper, it follows that phones are more wonderful every few weeks. The logic applies to laptops, intelligence in automobiles, and airline related functions.
The article focuses on the Intel-like world of computer parts. The write up makes this point which I highlighted:
From 2005 through 2014, Moore’s Law continued — but the emphasis was on improving cost by driving down the expense of each additional transistor. Those transistors might not run more quickly than their predecessors, but they were often more power-efficient and less expensive to build.
Yep, the cheaper point is significant. The article then tracks to a point that warranted a yellow highlight:
After 50 years, Moore’s Law has become cultural shorthand for innovation itself. When Intel, or Nvidia, or Samsung refer to Moore’s Law in this context, they’re referring to the continuous application of decades of knowledge and ingenuity across hundreds of products. It’s a way of acknowledging the tremendous collaboration that continues to occur from the fab line to the living room, the result of painstaking research aimed to bring a platform’s capabilities a little more in line with what users want. Is that marketing? You bet. But it’s not just marketing.
These two points sparked my thinking about the discipline of enterprise information access. Enterprise search relies on a wide range of computing operations. If these operations are indeed getting better, faster, and cheaper, does it make sense to assume that information retrieval is also getting better, faster, and cheaper?
What is happening from my point of view is that the basic design of enterprise information access systems has not changed significantly in the last decade, maybe longer. There is the content acquisition module, the normalization or transformation module, the indexing module, the query processing module, the administrative module, and other bits and pieces.
The outputs from today’s information access systems do not vary much from the outputs available from systems on offer a decade ago. Endeca generated visual reports by 2003. Relationship maps were available from Inxight and Semio (remember that outfit) even earlier. Smart software like the long forgotten Inference system winnowed results on what the user sought in his or her query. Linguistic functions were the heart and soul of Delphes. Statistical procedures were the backbone of PLS, based on Cornell wizardry.
Search and retrieval has benefited from faster hardware. But the computational burdens piled on available resources have made it possible to layer on function after function. The ability to make layers of content processing and filtering work has done little to ameliorate the grousing about many enterprise search systems.
The fix has not been to deliver a solution significantly different from what Autonomy and Fast Search offered in 2001. The fix has been to shift from what users’ need to deal with business questions to:
- Business intelligence
- Semantics
- Natural language processing
- Cognitive computing
- Metadata
- Visualization
- Text analytics.
I know I am missing some of the chestnuts. The point is that information access may be lagging behind certain other sectors; for example, voice search via a mobile device. When I review a “new” search solution, I often find myself with the same sense of wonder I had when I first walked through the Smithsonian Museum: Interesting but mostly old stuff.
Just a thought that enterprise search is delivering less, not “Moore.”
Stephen E Arnold, April 17, 2015
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