Microsoft Search: Still Playing an Old Eight Track Cassette?
November 20, 2019
How many times has DarkCyber heard about Microsoft’s improved search? Once, twice? Nope, dozens upon dozens. Whether it was the yip yap about Fast Search & Transfer, Colloquis and its natural language processing, Powerset and its semantic search system, Semantic Machines for natural voice functions, or the home brew solutions from hither and yon in the Microsoft research and development empire. There’s Outlook search and Bing search and probably a version of LinkedIn’s open source search kicking around too.
But that’s irrelevant in today’s “who cares about the past?” datasphere. DarkCyber noted “Here’s How Microsoft Is Looking to Make Search Smarter and More Natural.” What is smart search? An abrogation of user intentions? What is more natural? Boolean logic, field codes, date and time metadata, and similar artifacts of a long lost era seem okay for the DarkCyber team.
The write up explains in its own surrealistic way:
Microsoft’s ultimate goal with Microsoft Search is to provide answers not just to simple queries, but also more personalized, complex ones, such as “Can I bring my pet to work?”. The Microsoft Graph API, semantic knowledge understanding from Bing, machine-reading comprehension and the Office 365 storage and services substrate all are playing a role in bringing this kind of search to Microsoft’s apps.
Yeah, okay. But enterprise SharePoint users still complain that current content cannot be located. The current tools are blind to versions of content residing on departmental servers or parked in a cloud account owned by the legal department. And what about the prices just quoted by an enterprise sales professional? Sorry. You are out of luck, but Microsoft is… trying.
Now grab this peek into the future of Microsoft search:
Turing in Bing already has helped Microsoft to understand semantics via searching by concept instead of keyword. Natural-language processing also has helped with understanding query intent, she noted. Semantic understanding means users don’t have to expect exact word matches. (When searching for Coke, matches with “canned soda,” also could be part of the set of results generated, for example.) The Turing researchers are employing machine reading, as well, to help with contextual search/results.
The chaotic and often misfiring Microsoft search technologies do one thing well: Generate revenue for the legions of certified Microsoft partners.
Users? Yeah, Microsoft may help you too. In the meantime, the lawyers will manage their own contract drafts and eDiscovery materials. The engineers will stick with the tools baked into AutoCAD type systems? The marketers will do what marketers in many companies do? Stuff data on USBs, into the Google cloud, or copy the files to a shared folder on a former employee’s desktop. Yes, it happens.
Microsoft and search. Getting better. Here’s a snippet about Powerset (CNET, 2008)
Much of what Powerset has enabled with its technology is a superior user experience for searching. Powerset’s Wikipedia search, which surfaces concepts, meanings, and relationships (like subject, verbs, and objects in a language), is the very small tip of the iceberg.
Time for a new eight track tape?
Stephen E Arnold, November 20, 2019
Enterprise Search and Grease Management
June 7, 2019
I see some crazy stuff. Every once in a while, a really crazy item crosses my desk. The example I wish to highlight today is called “Enterprise Search Software Market to depict huge growth, Key Methodologies, Top Players: SharePoint, IBM, Lucidworks, Microsoft FAST, Oracle, Amazon CloudSearch, Apache Lucene, Attivio.” My hunch is that rolling in Amazon and Microsoft cloud revenues will make almost any market look like Popeye the Sailor Man. The reality is that enterprise search came and went in a blaze of litigation and embarrassment. Some of the exhaust seems to be emanating from the Hewlett Packard litigation related to the former medical device maker’s acquisition of an enterprise search vendor.
Enterprise search has overpromised and under delivered for about 50 years. Elsewhere I have recounted the adventures of services which most people don’t recall or simply knew nothing about. Remember InQuire, the service with forward truncation? A more recent fumble is the disappearance of those cheerful yellow Google Search Appliances, its staff, and the marketing collateral promising an end to the misery of traditional enterprise search solutions.
The buzz has not died down at at Reports Monitor. You can read their remarkable news release at this link. Forget the incredible hyperbole of “huge growth.” Hello, Reports Monitor, one can download a perfectly good enterprise search system from open source repositories. There are low cost systems available from outfits like Funnelback. You can get a next generation system from vendors of intelware. Don’t recognize the term? Don’t worry. These vendors don’t know what enterprise search means. And there are some companies which this report does not list as players. Want these names? Sorry, that’s information for which I charge a fee. Believe me. Reports Monitor and perhaps you, gentle reader, don’t know about these companies either.
What causes me to write about a report which is a bit on the wild side? How about this passage:
Key Insights:
- Complete in-depth analysis of the Grease Management in Commercial Kitchens
- Important changes in market dynamics.
- Segmentation analysis of the market.
- Emerging segments and regional markets.
- Historical, on-going, and projected market analysis based on volume and esteem.
- Assessment of niche industry players.
- Market share analysis.
- Key strategies of major players.
Yep, grease management. Now we’re getting to the heart of slippery data and even more slippery reports about enterprise search. The report provides region-wise data. Great stuff.
News flash: Enterprise search left the dock and took on water. Some outfits torpedoed their investors, customers, and partners. Others have tried to become business intelligence, analytics, even customer service support systems. Did not work too well.
Why?
Enterprise search is not a general purpose application. Significant work is necessary to make it possible for employees to find information in what are silos or in oddball lingo. Furthermore important people like lawyers, product researchers, and big wheels like to keep their information secret. An enterprise search system has failure baked in unless it is tailored to a quite specific problem. But at that point why not buy an eDiscovery system, a lab notebook system, or a niche solution for the eager beavers in marketing?
Maybe I am too harsh on the grease management angle. That may be closer to the truth than Reports Monitor realizes.
Stephen E Arnold, June 7, 2019
Lucidworks: The Future of Search Which Has Already Arrived
August 24, 2017
I am pushing 74, but I am interested in the future of search. The reason is that with each passing day I find it more and more difficult to locate the information I need as my routine research for my books and other work. I was anticipating a juicy read when I requested a copy of “Enterprise Search in 2025.” The “book” is a nine page PDF. After two years of effort and much research, my team and I were able to squeeze the basics of Dark Web investigative techniques into about 200 pages. I assumed that a nine-page book would deliver a high-impact payload comparable to one of the chapters in one of my books like CyberOSINT or Dark Web Notebook.
I was surprised that a nine-page document was described as a “book.” I was quite surprised by the Lucidworks’ description of the future. For me, Lucidworks is describing information access already available to me and most companies from established vendors.
The book’s main idea in my opinion is as understandable as this unlabeled, data-free graphic which introduces the text content assembled by Lucidworks.
However, the pamphlet’s text does not make this diagram understandable to me. I noted these points as I worked through the basic argument that client server search is on the downturn. Okay. I think I understand, but the assertion “Solr killed the client-server stars” was interesting. I read this statement and highlighted it:
Other solutions developed, but the Solr ecosystem became the unmatched winner of the search market. Search 1.0 was over and Solr won.
In the world of open source search, Lucene and Solr have gained adherents. Based on the information my team gathered when we were working on an IDC open source search project, the dominant open source search system was Lucene. If our data were accurate when we did the research, Elastic’s Elasticsearch had emerged as the go-to open source search system. The alternatives like Solr and Flaxsearch have their users and supporters, but Elastic, founded by Shay Branon, was a definite step up from his earlier search service called Compass.
In the span of two and a half years, Elastic had garnered more than a $100 million in funding by 2014and expanded into a number adjacent information access market sectors. Reports I have received from those attending Elastic meetings was that Elastic was putting considerable pressure on proprietary search systems and a bit of a squeeze on Lucidworks. Google’s withdrawing its odd duck Google Search Appliance may have been, in small part, due to the rise of Elasticsearch and the changes made by organizations trying to figure out how to make sense of the digital information to which their staff had access.
But enough about the Lucene-Solr and open source versus proprietary search yin and yang tension.
New Enterprise Search Market Study
August 1, 2017
Don Quixote and Solving Death: No Problem, Amigo
I read “Global Enterprise Search Market 2017-2022.” I was surprised that a consulting firms would invest time and energy in writing about a market sector which has not been thriving. Now don’t start sending me email about my lack of cheerfulness about enterprise search. The sector is thriving, but it is doing so with approaches that are disguised as applications which deliver something other than inflated expectations, business closures, and lawsuits.
I will slay the beast that is enterprise search. “Hold still, you knave!”
First, let’s look at what the report covers, then I will tackle some of the issues about which I think as the author of the Enterprise Search Report and a number of search-related articles and analyses. (The articles are available from the estimable Information Today Web site, and the free analyses may be located at www.xenky.com/vendor-profiles.
The write up told me that enterprise search boils down to these companies:
Coveo Corp
Dassault Systemes
IBM Corp
Microsoft
Oracle
SAP AG
Coveo is a fork of Copernic. Yep, it’s a proprietary system which originally was focused on providing search for Microsoft. Now the company has spread its wings to include a raft of functions which range from the cloud to customer support / help desk services.
Dassault Systèmes is the owner of Exalead. Since the acquisition, Exalead as a brand has faded. The desktop search system was killed, and its proprietary technology lives on mostly as a replacement for Dassault’s internal search system which was based on Autonomy. Most of the search wizards have left, but the Exalead technology was good before Dassault learned that selling search was indeed a challenge.
IBM offers a number of products which include open source Lucene, acquired technology like Vivisimo’s clustering engine, and home brew code from its IBM wizards. (Did you know that the precursor of PageRank was an IBM “invention”?) The key is that IBM uses search to sell services which have a higher margins than providing a free version of brute force information access.
Study of Search: Weird Results Plus Bonus Errors
December 30, 2016
I was able to snag a copy of “Indexing and Search: A Peek into What Real Users Think.” The study appeared in October 2016, and it appears to be the work of IT Central Station, which is an outfit described as a source of “unbiased reviews from the tech community.” I thought, “Oh, oh, “real users.” A survey. An IDC type or Gartner type sample which although suspicious to me seems to convey some useful information when the moon is huge. Nope. Nope.Unbiased. Nope.
Note that the report is free. One can argue that free does not translate to accurate, high value, somewhat useful information. I support this argument.
The report, like many of the “real” reports I have reviewed over the decades is relatively harmless. In terms of today’s content payloads, the study fires blanks. Let’s take a look at some of the results, and you can work through the 16 pages to double check my critique.
First, who are the “top” vendors? This list reads quite a bit about the basic flaw in the “peek.” The table below presents the list of “top” vendors along with my comment about each vendor. Companies with open source Lucene/Solr based systems are in dark red. Companies or brands which have retired from the playing field in professional search are in bold gray.
| Vendor | Comment |
| Apache | This is not a search system. It is an open source umbrella for projects of which Lucene and Solr are two projects among many. |
| Attivio | Based on Lucene/Solr open source search software; positioned as a business intelligence vendor |
| Copernic | A desktop search and research system based on proprietary technology from the outfit known as Coveo |
| Coveo | A vendor of proprietary search technology now chasing Big Data and customer support |
| Dassault Systèmes | Owns Exalead which is now downgraded to a utility with Dassault’s PLM software |
| Data Design, now Ryft.com | Pitches search without indexing via propriety “circuit module” method |
| Data Gravity | Search is a utility in a storage centric system |
| DieselPoint | Company has been “quiet” for a number of years |
| Expert System | Publicly traded and revenue challenged vendor of a metadata utility, not a search system |
| Fabasoft | Mindbreeze is a proprietary replacement for SharePoint search |
| Discontinued the Google Search Appliance and exited enterprise search | |
| Hewlett Packard Enterprise | Sold its search technology to Micro Focus; legal dispute in progress over alleged fraud |
| IBM Ominifind | Lucene and proprietary scripts plus acquired technology |
| IBM StoredIQ | Like DB2 search, a proprietary utility |
| ISYS Search Software | Now owned by Lexmark and marginalized due to alleged revenue shortfalls |
| Lookeen | Lucene based desktop and Outlook search |
| Lucidworks | Solr add ons with floundering to be more than enterprise search |
| MAANA | Proprietary search optimized for Big Data |
| Microsoft | Offers multiple search solutions. The most notorious are Bing and Fast Search & Transfer proprietary solutions |
| Oracle | Full text search is a utility for Oracle licenses; owns Artificial Linguistics, Triple Hop, Endeca, RightNow, InQuira, and the marginalized Secure Enterprise Search. Oh, don’t forget command line querying via PL/SQL |
| Polyspot, now CustomerMatrix | Now a customer service vendor |
| Siderean Software | Went out of business in 2008; a semantic search outfit |
| Sinequa | Now a Big Data outfit with hopes of becoming the “next big thing” in whatever sells |
| X1 Search | An eternal start up pitching eDiscovery and desktop search with a wild and crazy interface |
What’s the table tell us about “top” systems? First, the list includes vendors not directly in the search and retrieval business. There is no differentiation among the vendors repackaging and reselling open source Lucene/Solr solutions. The listing is a fruit cake of desktop, database, and unstructured search systems. In short, the word “top” does not do the trick for me. I prefer “a list of eclectic and mostly unknown systems which include a search function.”
The report presents 10 bar charts which tell me absolutely nothing about search and retrieval. The bars appear to be a popularity content based on visits to the author’s Web site. Only two of the search systems listed in the bar chart have “reviews.” Autonomy IDOL garnered three reviews and Lookeen one review. The other eight vendors’ products were not reviewed. Autonomy and Lookeen could not be more different in purpose, design, and features.
The report then tackles the “top five” search systems in terms of clicks on the author’s Web site. Yep, clicks. That’s a heck of a yardstick because what percentage of clicks were humans and what percentage was bot driven? No answer, of course.
The most popular “solutions” illustrate the weirdness of the sample. The number one solution is DataGravity, which is a data management system with various features and utilities. The next four “top” solutions are:
- Oracle Endeca – eCommerce and business intelligence and whatever Oracle can use the ageing system for
- The Google Search Appliance – discontinued with a cloud solution coming down the pike, sort of
- Lucene – open source, the engine behind Elasticsearch, which is quite remarkably not on the list of vendors
- Microsoft Fast Search – included in SharePoint to the delight of the integrators who charge to make the dog heel once in a while.
I find it fascinating that DataGravity (1,273) garnered almost 4X the “votes” as Microsoft Fast Search (404). I think there are more than 200 million plus SharePoint licensees. Many of these outfits have many questions about Fast Search. I would hazard a guess that DataGravity has a tiny fraction of the SharePoint installed base and its brand identity and company name recognition are a fraction of Microsoft’s. Weird data or meaningless.
The bulk of the report are comparison of various search engines. I could not figure out the logic of the comparisons. What, for example, do Lookeen and IBM StoredIQ have in common? Answer: Zero.
The search report strikes me as a bit of silliness. The report may be an anti sales document. But your mileage will differ. If it does, good luck to you.
Stephen E Arnold, December 30, 2016
MC+A Is Again Independent: Search, Discovery, and Engineering Services
December 7, 2016
Beyond Search learned that MC+A has added a turbo-charger to its impressive search, content processing, and content management credentials. The company, based in Chicago, earned a gold star from Google for MC+A’s support and integration services for the now-discontinued Google Search Appliance. After working with the Yippy implementation of Watson Explorer, MC+A retains its search and retrieval capabilities, but expanded its scope. Michael Cizmar, the company’s president told Beyond Search, “Search is incredibly important, but customers require more multi-faceted solutions.” MC+A provides the engineering and technical capabilities to cope with Big Data, disparate content, cloud and mixed-environment platforms, and the type of information processing needed to generate actionable reports. [For more information about Cizmar’s views about search and retrieval, see “An Interview with Michael Cizmar.”
Cizmar added:
We solve organizational problems rooted in the lack of insight and accessibility to data that promotes operational inefficiency. Think of a support rep who has to look through five systems to find an answer for a customer on the phone. We are changing the way these users get to answers by providing them better insights from existing data securely. At a higher level we provide strategy support for executives looking for guidance on organizational change.
Alphabet Google’s decision to withdraw the Google Search Appliance has left more than 60,000 licensees looking for an alternative. Since the début of the GSA in 2002, Google trimmed the product line and did not move the search system to the cloud. Cizmar’s view of the GSA’s 12 year journey reveals that:
The Google Search Appliance was definitely not a failure. The idea that organizations wanted an easy-to-use, reliable Google-style search system was ahead of its time. Current GSA customers need some guidance on planning and recommendations on available options. Our point of view is that it’s not the time to simply swap out one piece of metal for another even if vendors claim “OEM” equivalency. The options available for data processing and search today all provide tremendous capabilities, including cognitive solutions which provide amazing capabilities to assist users beyond the keyword search use case.
Cizmar sees an opportunity to provide GSA customers with guidance on planning and recommendations on available options. MC+A understands the options available for data processing and information access today. The company is deeply involved in solutions which tap “smart software” to deliver actionable information.
Cizmar said:
Keyword search is a commodity at this point, and we helping our customers put search where the user is without breaking an established workflow. Answers, not laundry lists of documents to read, is paramount today. Customers want to solve specific problems; for example, reducing average call time customer support using smart software or adaptive, self service solutions. This is where MC+A’s capabilities deliver value.
MC+A is cloud savvy. The company realized that cloud and hybrid or cloud-on premises solutions were ways to reduce costs and improve system payoff. Cizmar was one of the technologists recognized by Google for innovation in cloud applications of the GSA. MC+A builds on that engineering expertise. Today, MC+A supports Google, Amazon, and other cloud infrastructures.
Cizmar revealed:
Amazon Elastic Cloud Search is probably doing as much business as Google did with the GSA but in a much different way. Many of these cloud-based offerings are generally solving the problem with the deployment complexities that go into standing up Elasticsearch, the open source version of Elastic’s information access system.
MC+A does not offer a one size fits all solution. He said:
The problem still remains of what should go into the cloud, how to get a solution deployed, and how to ensure usability of the cloud-centric system. The cloud offers tremendous capabilities in running and scaling a search cluster. However, with the API consumption model that we have to operate in, getting your data out of other systems into your search clusters remains a challenge. MC+A does not make security an afterthought. Access controls and system integrity have high priority in our solutions.
MC+A takes a business approach to what many engineering firms view as a technical problem. The company’s engineers examine the business use case. Only then does MC+A determine if the cloud is an option. If so, which product or projects capabilities meet the general requirements. After that process, MC+A implements its carefully crafted, standard deployment process.
Cizmar noted:
If you are a customer with all of your data on premises or have a unique edge case, it may not make sense to use a cloud-based system. The search system needs to be near to the content most of the time.
MC+A offers its white-labeled search “Practice in a Box” to former Google partners and other integrators. High-profile specialist vendors like Onix in Ohio are be able to resell our technology backed by the MC+A engineering team.
In 2017, MC+A will roll out a search solution which is, at this time, shrouded in secrecy. This new offering will go “beyond the GSA” and offer expanded information access functionality. To support this new product, MC+A will announce a specialized search practice.
He said:
This international practice will offer depth and breadth in selling and implementing solutions around cognitive search, assist, and analytics with products other than Google throughout the Americas. I see this as beneficial to other Google and non-Google resellers because, it allows other them to utilize our award winning team, our content filters, and a wealth of social proofs on a just in time basis.
For 2017, MC+A offers a range of products and services. Based on the limited information provided by the secrecy-conscious Michael Ciznar, Beyond Search believes that the company will offer implementation and support services for Lucene and Solr, IBM Watson, and Microsoft SharePoint. The SharePoint support will embrace some vendors supplying SharePoint centric like Coveo. Plus, MC+A will continue to offer software to acquire content and perform extract-transform-load functions on premises, in the cloud, or in hybrid configurations.,
MC+A’s approach offers a business-technology approach to information access.
For more information about MC+A, contact sales@mcplusa.com 312-585-6396.
Stephen E Arnold, December 7, 2016
Five Years in Enterprise Search: 2011 to 2016
October 4, 2016
Before I shifted from worker bee to Kentucky dirt farmer, I attended a presentation in which a wizard from Findwise explained enterprise search in 2011. In my notes, I jotted down the companies the maven mentioned (love that alliteration) in his remarks:
- Attivio
- Autonomy
- Coveo
- Endeca
- Exalead
- Fabasoft
- IBM
- ISYS Search
- Microsoft
- Sinequa
- Vivisimo.
There were nodding heads as the guru listed the key functions of enterprise search systems in 2011. My notes contained these items:
- Federation model
- Indexing and connectivity
- Interface flexibility
- Management and analysis
- Mobile support
- Platform readiness
- Relevance model
- Security
- Semantics and text analytics
- Social and collaborative features
I recall that I was confused about the source of the information in the analysis. Then the murky family tree seemed important. Five years later, I am less interested in who sired what child than the interesting historical nuggets in this simple list and collection of pretty fuzzy and downright crazy characteristics of search. I am not too sure what “analysis” and “analytics” mean. The notion that an index is required is okay, but the blending of indexing and “connectivity” seems a wonky way of referencing file filters or a network connection. With the Harvard Business Review pointing out that collaboration is a bit of a problem, it is an interesting footnote to acknowledge that a buzzword can grow into a time sink.
There are some notable omissions; for example, open source search options do not appear in the list. That’s interesting because Attivio was at that time I heard poking its toe into open source search. IBM was a fan of Lucene five years ago. Today the IBM marketing machine beats the Watson drum, but inside the Big Blue system resides that free and open source Lucene. I assume that the gurus and the mavens working on this list ignored open source because what consulting revenue results from free stuff? What happened to Oracle? In 2011, Oracle still believed in Secure Enterprise Search only to recant with purchases of Endeca, InQuira, and Rightnow. There are other glitches in the list, but let’s move on.
Microsoft Delve Described as Tainted
March 10, 2016
I read “Microsoft Delve Faces Challenges in Enterprise Search Role.” Seemed like old news to me. Fast Search never seemed to be in sync with what Fast marketers said the system could do.
In this write up, there is a darned remarkable statement. Here’s the quote that goes right into my “Did Someone Really Say This?” folder:
Delve is already a tainted product…
Gasp. Microsoft bought Fast Search & Transfer in 2008 for $1.2 billion. After the deal closed, the president of Fast Search found himself on the wrong end of Norwegian law. Microsoft killed the Unix version of Fast Search and seemed to be commited to making good on the promises Fast Search marketers offered. Check out the pre-sale presentation to CERN for the “future according to Fast Search.”
SharePoint search, the cloud thing, and Bing—Is Microsoft focused on enterprise search or any search application?
Any way that is quite a statement about Delve. Tainted ain’t a positive word.
Stephen E Arnold, March 10, 2016
Enterprise Search Revisionism: Can One Change What Happened
March 9, 2016
I read “The Search Continues: A History of Search’s Unsatisfactory Progress.” I noted some points which, in my opinion, underscore why enterprise search has been problematic and why the menagerie of experts and marketers have put search and retrieval on the path to enterprise irrelevance. The word that came to mind when I read the article was “revisionism” for the millennials among us.
The write up ignores the fact that enterprise search dates back to the early 1970s. One can argue that IBM’s Storage and Information Retrieval System (STAIRS) was the first significant enterprise search system. The point is that enterprise search as a productized service has a history of over promising and under delivering of more than 40 years.
Enterprise search with a touch of Stalinist revisionism.
Customers said they wanted to “find” information. What those individuals meant was have access to information that provided the relevant facts, documents, and data needed to deal with a problem.
Because providing on point information was and remains a very, very difficult problem, the vendors interpreted “find” to mean a list of indexed documents that contained the users’ search terms. But there was a problem. Users were not skilled in crafting queries which were essentially computer instructions between words the index actually contained.
After STAIRS came other systems, many other systems which have been documented reasonably well in Bourne and Bellardo-Hahn’s A History of Online information Services 1963-1976. (The period prior to 1970 describes for-fee research centric online systems. STAIRS was among the most well known early enterprise information retrieval system.) I provided some history in the first three editions of the Enterprise Search Report, published from 2003 to 2007. I have continued to document enterprise search in the Xenky profiles and in this blog.
The history makes painful reading for those who invested in many search and retrieval companies and for the executives who experienced the crushing of their dreams and sometimes career under the buzz saw of reality.
In a nutshell, enterprise search vendors heard what prospects, workers overwhelmed with digital and print information, and unhappy users of those early systems were saying.
The disconnect was that enterprise search vendors parroted back marketing pitches that assured enterprise procurement teams of these functions:
- Easy to use
- “All” information instantly available
- Answers to business questions
- Faster decision making
- Access to the organization’s knowledge.
The result was a steady stream of enterprise search product launches. Some of these were funded by US government money like Verity. Sure, the company struggled with the cost of infrastructure the Verity system required. The work arounds were okay as long as the infrastructure could keep pace with the new and changed word-centric documents. Toss in other types of digital information, make the system perform ever faster indexing, and keep the Verity system responding quickly was another kettle of fish.
Research oriented information retrieval experts looked at the Verity type system and concluded, “We can do more. We can use better algorithms. We can use smart software to eliminate some of the costs and indexing delays. We can [ fill in the blank ].
The cycle of describing what an enterprise search system could actually deliver was disconnected from the promises the vendors made. As one moves through the decades from 1973 to the present, the failures of search vendors made it clear that:
- Companies and government agencies would buy a system, discover it did not do the job users needed, and buy another system.
- New search vendors picked up the methods taught at Cornell, Stanford, and other search-centric research centers and wrap on additional functions like semantics. The core of most modern enterprise search systems is unchanged from what STAIRS implemented.
- Search vendors came like Convera, failed, and went away. Some hit revenue ceilings and sold to larger companies looking for a search utility. The acquisitions hit a high water mark with the sale of Autonomy (a 1990s system) to HP for $11 billion.
What about Oracle, as a representative outfit. Oracle database has included search as a core system function since the day Larry Ellison envisioned becoming a big dog in enterprise software. The search language was Oracle’s version of the structured query language. But people found that difficult to use. Oracle purchased Artificial Linguistics in order to make finding information more intuitive. Oracle continued to try to crack the find information problem through the acquisitions of Triple Hop, its in-house Secure Enterprise Search, and some other odds and ends until it bought in rapid succession InQuira (a company formed from the failure of two search vendors), RightNow (technology from a Dutch outfit RightNow acquired), and Endeca. Where is search at Oracle today? Essentially search is a utility and it is available in Oracle applications: customer support, ecommerce, and business intelligence. In short, search has shifted from the “solution” to a component used to get started with an application that allows the user to find the answer to business questions.
I mention the Oracle story because it illustrates the consistent pattern of companies which are actually trying to deliver information that the u9ser of a search system needs to answer a business or technical question.
I don’t want to highlight the inaccuracies of “The Search Continues.” Instead I want to point out the problem buzzwords create when trying to understand why search has consistently been a problem and why today’s most promising solutions may relegate search to a permanent role of necessary evil.
In the write up, the notion of answering questions, analytics, federation (that is, running a single query across multiple collections of content and file types), the cloud, and system performance are the conclusion of the write up.
Wrong.
The use of open source search systems means that good enough is the foundation of many modern systems. Palantir-type outfits, essential an enterprise search vendors describing themselves as “intelligence” providing systems,, uses open source technology in order to reduce costs, shift bug chasing to a community, The good enough core is wrapped with subsystems that deal with the pesky problems of video, audio, data streams from sensors or similar sources. Attivio, formed by professionals who worked at the infamous Fast Search & Transfer company, delivers active intelligence but uses open source to handle the STAIRS-type functions. These companies have figured out that open source search is a good foundation. Available resources can be invested in visualizations, generating reports instead of results lists, and graphical interfaces which involve the user in performing tasks smart software at this time cannot perform.
For a low cost enterprise search system, one can download Lucene, Solr, SphinxSearch, or any one of a number of open source systems. There are low cost (keep in mind that costs of search can be tricky to nail down) appliances from vendors like Maxxcat and Thunderstone. One can make do with the craziness of the search included with Microsoft SharePoint.
For a serious application, enterprises have many choices. Some of these are highly specialized like BAE NetReveal and Palantir Metropolitan. Others are more generic like the Elastic offering. Some are free like the Effective File Search system.
The point is that enterprise search is not what users wanted in the 1970s when IBM pitched the mainframe centric STAIRS system, in the 1980s when Verity pitched its system, in the 1990s when Excalibur (later Convera) sold its system, in the 2000s when Fast Search shifted from Web search to enterprise search and put the company on the road to improper financial behavior, and in the efflorescence of search sell offs (Dassault bought Exalead, IBM bought iPhrase and other search vendors), and Lexmark bought Brainware and ISYS Search Software.
Where are we today?
Users still want on point information. The solutions on offer today are application and use case centric, not the silly one-size-fits-all approach of the period from 2001 to 2011 when Autonomy sold to HP.
Open source search has helped create an opportunity for vendors to deliver information access in interesting ways. There are cloud solutions. There are open source solutions. There are small company solutions. There are more ways to find information than at any other time in the history of search as I know it.
Unfortunately, the same problems remain. These are:
- As the volume of digital information goes up, so does the cost of indexing and accessing the sources in the corpus
- Multimedia remains a significant challenge for which there is no particularly good solution
- Federation of content requires considerable investment in data grooming and normalizing
- Multi-lingual corpuses require humans to deal with certain synonyms and entity names
- Graphical interfaces still are stupid and need more intelligence behind the icons and links
- Visualizations have to be “accurate” because a bad decision can have significant real world consequences
- Intelligent systems are creeping forward but crazy Watson-like marketing raises expectations and exacerbates the credibility of enterprise search’s capabilities.
I am okay with history. I am not okay with analyses that ignore some very real and painful lessons. I sure would like some of the experts today to know a bit more about the facts behind the implosions of Convera, Delphis, Entopia, and many other companies.
I also would like investors in search start ups to know a bit more about the risks associated with search and content processing.
In short, for a history of search, one needs more than 900 words mixing up what happened with what is.
Stephen E Arnold, March 9, 2016
The Progress and Obstacles for Microsoft Delve When It Comes to On-Premise Search
March 7, 2016
The article titled Microsoft Delve Faces Challenges in Enterprise Search Role on Search Content Management posits that Microsoft Delve could use some serious enhancements to ensure that it functions as well with on-premises data as it does with data from the cloud. Delve is an exciting step forward, an enterprise-wide search engine that relies on machine learning to deliver relevant results. The article even goes so far as to call it a “digital assistant” that can make decisions based on an analysis of previous requests and preferences. But there is a downside, and the article explains it,
“Microsoft Delve isn’t being used to its full potential. Deployed within the cloud-based Office 365 (O365) environment, it can monitor activity and retrieve information from SharePoint, OneDrive and Outlook in a single pass — and that’s pretty impressive. But few organizations have migrated their entire enterprise to O365, and a majority never will: Hybrid deployments and blending cloud systems with on-premises platforms are the norm… if an organization has mostly on-premises data, its search results will always be incomplete.”
With a new version of Delve in the works at Microsoft, the message has already been received. According to the article, the hybrid Delve will be the first on-premise product based on SharePoint Online. You can almost hear the content management specialists holding their breaths for an integrated cloud and on-premise architecture for search.
Chelsea Kerwin, March 7, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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