The Hay Day of Search Has a Ground Hog Moment
December 19, 2024
This blog post is the work of an authentic dinobaby. No smart software was used.
I think it was 2002 or 2003 that I started writing the first of three editions of Enterprise Search Report. I am not sure what happened to the publisher who liked big, fat thick printed books. He has probably retired to an island paradise to ponder the crashing blue surf.
But it seems that the salad days of enterprise search are back. Elastic is touting semantics, smart software, and cyber goodness. IBM is making noises about “Watson” in numerous forms just gift wrapped with sparkly AI ice cream jimmies. There is a start up called Swirl. The HuggingFace site includes numerous references to finding and retrieving. And there is Glean.
I keep seeing references to Glean. When I saw a link to the content marketing piece “Glean’s Approach to Smarter Systems: AI, Inferencing and Enterprise Data,” I read it. I learned that the company did not want to be an AI outfit, a statement I am not sure how to interpret; nevertheless, the founder of Glean is quoted as saying:
“We didn’t actually set out to build an AI application. We were first solving the problem of people can’t find anything in their work lives. We built a search product and we were able to use inferencing as a core part of our overall product technology,” he said. “That has allowed us to build a much better search and question-and-answering product … we’re [now] able to answer their questions using all of their enterprise knowledge.”
And what happened to finding information? The company has moved into:
- Workflows
- Intelligent data discovery
- Problem solving
And the result is not finding information:
Glean enables enterprises to improve efficiency while maintaining control over their knowledge ecosystem.
Translation: Enterprise search.
The old language of search is gone, but it seems to me that “search” is now explained with loftier verbiage than that used by Fast Search & Transfer in a lecture delivered in Switzerland before the company imploded.
Is it now time for write the “Enterprise Knowledge Ecosystem Report”? Possibly for someone, but it’s Ground Hog time. I have been there and done that. Everyone wants search to work. New words and the same challenges. The hay is growing thick and fast.
Stephen E Arnold, December 19, 2024
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