Mapping the New Landscape of Enterprise Search
May 23, 2011
What has happened to enterprise search? In a down economy, confusion among potential licensees has increased, based on the information I gathered for my forthcoming The Landscape of Enterprise Search, to be published by Pandia in June 2011. The price for the 186 page report is $20 US and 15 euros. Pandia and I decided that the information in the report should be available to those wrestling with enterprise search. With some “experts’ charging $500 and more for brief, pay to play studies, our approach is to provide substantive information at a very competitive price point.
In this completely new report, my team and I compress a complex subject into a manageable 150 pages of text. There are 30 pages of supplementary material, which you use as needed. The core of the report is an eyes-wide-open analysis of six key vendors: Autonomy, Endeca, Exalead, Google, Microsoft, and Vivisimo.
You may recall that in the 2004 edition of the Enterprise Search Report, I covered about two dozen vendors. By the time I completed the third edition (the last one I wrote), the coverage had swelled to more than 28 vendors and to an unwieldy 600 plus pages of text.
In this new Landscape report, the publisher, my team, and I focused on the companies most often included in procurement reviews. With more than 200 vendors offering enterprise search solutions, there are 194 vendors who could argue that their system is better, faster, and cheaper than the vendors’ systems discussed in Landscape. That may be true, but to include a large number of vendors makes for another unwieldy report. I know from conversations with people who call me asking about another “encyclopedia of search” that most people want two or three profiles of search vendors. We maintain profiles for about 50 systems, and we track about 300 vendors in our in house Overflight system.
My team and I have tried to make clear the key points about the age and technical aspects of each vendor’s search solution. I am also focused on explaining what systems can and cannot do. If you want information that will strike you as new and different, you will want to get a copy of my new Landscape report.
Are you lost in the alchemist’s laboratory? This is a place where unscientific and fiddling take precedence over facts. Little wonder when “experts” explain enterprise search, there is no “lead into gold” moment. There is a mess. The New Landscape of Search helps you avoid the alchemists’ approach. Facts help reduce the risk in procuring an enterprise search solution.
New Landscape of Enterprise Search Details Available
May 18, 2011
Stephen E Arnold’s new report about enterprise search will be shipping in two weeks. The New Landscape of Enterprise Search: A Critical Review of the Market and Search Systems provides a fresh perspective on a fascinating enterprise application.
The centerpiece of the report are new analyses of search and retrieval systems offered by:
Unlike the “pay to play” analyses from industry consultant and self-appointed “experts,” Mr. Arnold’s approach is based on his work in developing search systems and researching search systems to support certain inquiries into systems’ performance and features.
, to focus on the broad changes which have roiled the enterprise search and content processing market. Unlike his first “encyclopedia” of search systems and his study of value added indexing systems, this new report takes an unvarnished look at the business and financial factors that make enterprise search a challenge. Then he uses a historical base to analyze the upsides and downsides of six vendors’ search solutions. He puts the firm’s particular technical characteristics in sharp relief. A reader gains a richer understanding of what makes a particular vendor’s system best suited for specific information access applications.
Other features of the report include:
- Diagrams of system architecture and screen shots of exemplary implementations
- Lists of resellers and partners of the profiled vendors
- A comprehensive glossary which attempts to cut through the jargon and marketing baloney which impedes communication about search and retrieval
- A ready-reference table for more than 20 vendors’ enterprise search solutions
- An “outlook” section which offers candid observations about the attrition and financial health of the hundreds of companies offering search solutions.
More information about the report is available at http://goo.gl/0vSql. You may reserve your copy by writing seaky2000 @ yahoo dot com. Full ordering information and pricing will be available in the near future.
Donald C Anderson, May 18, 2011
Post paid for by Stephen E Arnold
Maps on Steroids
May 17, 2011
Here is an interesting link from the people behind Mapsys.info: “Public Data Visualization with Google Maps and Fusion Tables”.
“Visualizing” public data basically means mapping information that is relevant to a community. A good working example mentioned in the posting is San Francisco’s Bay Area bike accident tracker. The map’s legend decodes the various colored dots as the type of accident and how it came to be recorded.
Source: http://mapsys.info/
A screenshot of the coding needing to display a map with personalized details is offered in the posting. The star of the show is the integration with a fusion table, a tool offered by Google to house data sets to be presented on a map. Added functionality is included by using “SQL-like query syntax” and leveraging “the Python libraries Google provides for query generation and API calls”. This allows you to pick smaller data sets out of the fusion table.
So behind the scenes, this looks like another example of search moving beyond the token keyword. You won’t hear any complaints out of us. I remember creating maps using old fashioned methods when I was working on my engineering degree. This method delivers accuracy and time savings.
Sarah Rogers, May 17, 2011
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Google and Search
May 11, 2011
Over the last five days, I have been immersed in conversations about Google and its public Web search system. I am not able to disclose the people with whom I have spoken. However, I want to isolate the issues that surfaced and offer some observations about the role of traditional Web sites. I want to capture the thoughts that surfaced after I thought about what I learned in my face to face and telephone conversations. In fact, one of the participants in this conversation directed my attention to this post, “Google Panda=Disaster.” I don’t think the problem is Panda. I think a more fundamental change has taken place and Google’s methods are just out of sync with the post shift environment. But hope is not lost. At the end of this write up, I provide a way for you to learn about a different approach. Sales pitch? Sure but a gentle one.
Relevance versus Selling Advertising
The main thrust of the conversations was that Google’s Web search is degrading. I have not experienced this problem, but the three groups with whom I spoke have. Each had different data to show that Google’s method of handling their publicly accessible Web site has changed.
First, one vendor reported that traffic to the firm’s Web site had dropped from 2,000 uniques per month to 100. The Web site is informational. There is a widget that displays headlines from the firm’s Web log. The code is clean and the site is not complex.
Second, another vendor reported that content from the firm’s news page was appearing on competitors’ Web sites. More troubling, the content was appearing high in a Google results list. However, the creator of the content found that the stories from the originating Web site were buried deep in the Google results list. The point is that others were recycling original content and receiving a higher ranking than the source of the original content.
Traditional Web advertising depicted brilliantly by Ken Rockwell. See his work at http://www.kenrockwell.com/canon/compacts/sd880/gallery-10.htm
Third, the third company found that its core business was no longer appearing in a Google results list for a query about the type of service the firm offered. However, the company was turning up in an unrelated or, at best, secondary results list.
I had no answer to the question each firm asked me, “What’s going on?”
Through various contacts, I pieced together a picture that suggests Google itself may not know what is happening. One source indicated that the core search team responsible for the PageRank output is doing its work much as it has for the last 12 years. Googlers responsible for selling advertising were not sure what changes were going on in the core search team’s algorithm tweaks. Not surprisingly, most people are scrutinizing search results, fiddling with metatags and other aspects of a Web site, and then checking to see what happened. The approach is time consuming and, in my opinion, very much like the person who plugs a token into a slot machine and hits the jack pot. There is great excitement at the payoff, but the process is not likely to work on the next go round.
Net net: I think there is a communications filter (intentional or unintentional) between the group at Google working to improve relevance and the sales professionals at Google who need to sell advertising. On one hand, this is probably healthy because many organizations put a wall between certain company functions. On the other hand, if Adwords and Adsense are linked to traffic and that traffic is highly variable, some advertisers may look to other alternatives. Facebook’s alleged 30 percent share of the banner advertising market may grow if the efficacy of Google’s advertising programs drops.
Fresh Spin on SMS
March 7, 2011
One of the PhDs who help out ArnoldIT.com sent me a link to a blog post. I read “Texting Power”. Worth a look. The Tiger Text product caught the attention of the Wall Street Journal.
Stephen E Arnold, March 7, 2011
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Bing Trumps the GOOG in Travel Search
March 2, 2011
We just posted a short item to a BusinessWeek story that suggested Google has lost some of its sheen. The write up “Bing’s Travel Search, So Much Better Than Google, Gets Even Better” is worth reading. The point in the write up that caught our attention was:
Google does almost nothing interesting in travel search.
Our take on this is that after the miraculous year of 2006, Google has been like a soap box derby racer. The velocity increases as the car moves down the course.
What’s happened in the span of 48 months? Obviously BusinessWeek and now ReadWriteWeb are pointing out deficiencies.
We think these observations are warranted, but the question remains, “What will Google do to address what happens when gravity and friction take over?” We will have to wait until one of the majors in American 19th century fiction, a former Web master, or an unemployed journalist tackles the question and illuminates the underlying issues at the GOOG.
Too bad about travel. I used to show the in situ display of air fares, a function I you can see by running the query “lga sfo”.
Stephen E Arnold, March 2, 2011
Freebie unlike air travel
The Visual Study of Google and Bing
February 1, 2011
WebProNews caught our attention. We have been looking at screenshots of Fast ESP Version 5.x circa 2007 and the screenshots for the Microsoft Fast Search Server. Even the goslings see some big similarities. We even asked, “What happened to Mars, the Java based replacement for Fast 5.x?” Might be still there, lurking under the UX or user experience.
“Google Edges Bing For Visual Attention” explains a study conducted by User Centric. The research firm compared the two search giants to examine how long users viewed each part of the search results page. The top three paid links on Google’s website attract more attention than Bing’s and users spent more time reading Google’s basic search results than on Bing.
“Taking longer to make a decision and scanning more results may suggest lower perceived search results relevancy on Google. According to past research, users tend to scan search results until they find the first suitable link to click, so more time spent on Google could mean it took longer to find a link worth clicking.”
Are search engine designers more interested in how the results are displayed than actual relevancy? While user experience is important, it accounts for nothing if returned results do not have the appropriate information. Precision and recall are the best ways for any search engine to operate.
We think that precision and recall are important. Slapping a fancy face on any system—Bing, Google, whatever—is secondary to the quality of the search results.
Whitney Grace, February 1, 2011
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Self-Service Business Intelligence: McDonaldization of Data
January 20, 2011
Drive into McDonald’s. Hear a recorded message about a special. Issue order. Get Big Mac and lots of questionable commercial food output. Leave.
Yep, business intelligence and “I’m loving it.”
No one pays much attention to the food production system and even less to what happens between the cow’s visit to the feedlot and the All American meal.
Ah, self-service. Convenience. Speed. Ease of use. Yes!
These days we pump our own gas (minus Oregon and NJ) and pour our own soft drinks. We Google instead of asking the reference librarian (usually).
Is this the future of Business Intelligence? “Soon Self-Service BI, SaaS to Dominate the Tech World” predicts that 2011 will bring an increase in self-service BI. According to SiliconIndia News: “Numerous vendors, including IBM, SAP, Information Builders, Tibco Software, QlikTech, and Tableau Software, already offer [self-service BI] tools, and adoption will accelerate as more companies try to deliver BI capabilities to nontechnical users, business analysts, and others.” The question becomes: Will the users know what the outputs mean? The SaaS part of the prediction I heartily agree with, in BI and everywhere else.
What if the data are dirty? Malformed? Selected to present a particular view of the Big Mac world? How about that user experience?
Alice Wasielewski, January 20, 2011
Exclusive Interview: Sam Brooks, EBSCO Publishing
January 18, 2011
We have been covering “discovery” in Beyond Search since 2008. We added a discovery-centric blog called IntelTrax to our line up in September 2010. One of the companies that caught our attention was EBSCO Publishing, one of the leaders in the commercial database, library information, and electronic publishing sectors. EBSCO has embraced discovery technology, making “search without search”, faceted navigation, and other user-centric features available to EBSCO customers. Chances are your university, junior college, middle school, and primary school libraries use EBSCO products and services. Thousands of organizations world wide rely on EBSCO for high-value, third party content, including rich media. You can get the details of the EBSCO content and information services offerings at http://www.ebscohost.com/.
I wanted to know how a company anchored in online technology moved “beyond search” so effectively. I spoke last week with Sam Brooks, senior vice president of EBSCO Publishing. He told me:
As library users have grown accustomed to the simplicity and one-stop shopping of web search engines, EDS allows users to initiate a comprehensive search of a library’s entire collection via a single search box. The true value of EDS is that while providing a simple, familiar search experience to end users, the sophistication of the service combined with the depth of available metadata allows EDS to return extensive results as if the user had performed more advanced searches across a number of premium resources.
EBSCO’s presentation is easily customized. This particular user interface matches the rich options available from such companies as i2 Ltd. and Palantir, two leaders in the “beyond search” approach to information.
The new discovery interface makes it easy to pull together a broad range of content to answer a user’s query. The interface then goes farther. Exploring a topic or following a research thread is facilitated with the hot links displayed to the user. The technology for the user interface is intuitive. Mr. Brooks told me:
By using our EBSCOhost infrastructure as the foundation for EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS), the entire library collection becomes available through a fast, familiar, full-featured experience that requires no additional training. Additionally, unprecedented levels of interface customization allow libraries to use EDS as the basis for creating their own “discovery” service. Currently, users can access EDS via the mobile version of the EBSCOhost interface. Further, there will soon also be a dedicated iPhone/iPad app for use with EDS as well.
For the full text of the exclusive interview, navigate to the Search Wizards Speak feature at this link.
Stephen E Arnold, January 18, 2011
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Search and the Responsive Web
January 13, 2011
I hate the term UX, shorthand for user experience. “Responsive Web Design: What It Is and How To Use It” introduced me to a new term, “responsive Web design.” I like it. The article that explains what responsive Web design is. The passage I noted was:
We should rather start a new era today: creating websites that are future-ready right now. Understanding how to make a design responsive to the user doesn’t require too much learning, and it can definitely be a lot less stressful and more productive than learning how to design and code properly for every single device available. Responsive Web design and the techniques discussed above are not the final answer to the ever-changing mobile world. Responsive Web design is a mere concept that when implemented correctly can improve the user experience, but not completely solve it for every user, device and platform.
The article includes a number of excellent examples and some of those very useful, ready to edit code snippets that the goslings and I love.
What can search vendors learn from this write up? In my opinion, vendors can learn how to break out of the search box. Times and user needs have changed. It’s not experience. It is responsiveness.
Stephen E Arnold, January 13, 2011
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