Beyond Search for 2019
January 1, 2019
I started Beyond Search to focus on new developments in enterprise search. That was in 2008. After 10 years of focusing on search, I have decided to retain the url but shift Beyond Search to cover the hidden Internet and lesser known Internet services. The blog will undergo a modest redesign and be called “DarkCyber Annex.”
Why an annex?
The modified Beyond Search blog will include information which supplements my weekly DarkCyber video. DarkCyber has been in production for one year, and it is—as far as I know—the only weekly video news program reporting about intelware, hidden Internet sites, and cyber crime.
To keep the videos in the 10 minute range, my team and I have to prune stories and content.
DarkCyber Annex, therefore, will be the online location for some of our additional content. We will continue to include links in the weekly videos, but now a version of the video story will appear in the DarkCyber Annex and include hyperlinks to source documents.
The flow of stories to Beyond Search will go down, and those assisting me in creating content for DarkCyber Annex will increase the flow of stories on the themes I have identified.
I plan to leave the Beyond Search content online. The 16,899 stories will be searchable but frozen. Looking back, enterprise search companies often described a fantastical world in which instant access was both marketed and sold.
That contributed to the implosion of the enterprise search sector. Today, if one wants search, many choose Lucene / Solr. Vendors of old school proprietary information retrieval systems will still market aggressively, pay consulting firms to sing the praises of the systems, and hold conferences which recycle words and concepts which are decades old.
Enough. Stale conferences. Endless repetition of hard-to-believe claims. Weird Eisenhower / BCG charts comprised of subjective silliness. Flaccid essays in online blogs and news services about “content management.” Yada yada yada.
For me, the subject is not just uninteresting. Enterprise search is a case study in what is likely to happen to other technologies in search of a solution informed by watching Star Trek. Explaining enterprise search in terms of “governance” in our Facebook world is shallow.
In 2019, I will try to make clear that intelware, not search, is where information access is today. Banging in key words still works, but the innovators are pushing into function spaces that deliver on some of the wild and crazy claims made in the salad days of Autonomy, Convera, Endeca, Fast Search & Transfer, and the dozens upon dozens of other companies I tracked in my career.
Enterprise search has fallen on its sword. New solutions have become available, but so far enterprises remain unaware of some of the most promising vendors.
DarkCyber videos and DarkCyber Annex will try to fill the information void. After all, we know traditional search is not too useful, right?
Stephen E Arnold, January 1, 2018
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
