Amazon Uses Googley Phrase Which Also Was Mostly Marketing Hoo Hah
December 17, 2020
You may not remember, but I do. Like yesterday. I wrote an analysis for the late, highly regarded financial services firm and contract bridge epicenter BearStearns. The document was published more than a decade ago. Two things happened. Google immediately rolled out a special event to announce universal search. I heard that the name morphed into unified search and then federated search among some Googlers. The idea is that a user runs a query and expects the content of which he or she is aware will be in the results. Ho ho ho. The merrie search elves know that even at the mighty Google one must search silos of data. Universal, unified, federated. That’s like a Dark Web vendor posting 1 800 YOU WISH as the customer support number for bogus contraband.
Imagine my surprise when I noted this Amazon post:
Universal, unified, whatever. I find it fascinating how search related terminology comes into vogue and falls out of favor only to return in a weird but actually identifiable Kondratiev waves. Examples include:
- Inference (nifty but there was a search vendor called Inference now essentially forgotten)
- Boolean which several vendors have resurrected after thumbtypers declared the method dead
- indexing now creeping back into favor after metadata and enrichment have not moved the needle for jargon recycling.
Yep, unified. Much better than “federated”, of course. Remember Vivisimo? I sort of do, but IBM repositioned it as some whizzy part of Watson. Is search at AWS or anywhere for that matter what the user expects. Ho ho ho say the merrie search elves. Ho ho ho. That’s a good one.
Stephen E Arnold, December 16, 2020
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
