Attivio: Moving Beyond Search Aggressively
May 27, 2008
An exclusive interview with Attivio’s founder Ali Riaz is now available in ArnoldIT.com’s Search Wizards Speak series.
Mr. Riaz revealed that traditional search engines add some extra work for the user. He told ArnoldIT.com:
Legacy search thinking suggests that the search box is the answer for everything. At the simplest level, people look for things in two ways: “I know what I’m looking for, just tell me where it is” (the search box), and “I don’t know what I’m looking for specifically, but I know how to describe it so let me navigate and explore; let me ‘disambiguate’ my way to the answer.” We think the latter approach is the more powerful of the two and what we’re hearing from prospects, especially in the enterprise. In many ways, you can think of the search box as the user interface of last resort. It has its place, but search is best used when it is woven throughout an application’s capabilities rather than offered as an isolated, off-to-the-side interface on its own. Search needs to feel natural to be truly effective. Of course, when all else fails, then type something in a search box, but a good search engine prevents this happening wherever it can.
With dissatisfaction emerging as one of the themes of the Enterprise Search Summit in New York City in May 2008, Mr. Riaz told ArnoldIT.com said:
… Internal information technology units are overwhelmed. We believe they are overwhelmed by complexity and incompatibility. Today’s legacy search engines are simply too complex to manage, and needlessly, I might add. As well, their pricing models in most cases are a disincentive to grow the technology throughout the organization because they commonly charge per usage, either index size – number of documents or disk space – or query capacity, or per user. We offer a much simpler, more one-size-fits-all model. By the way, we also federate across to the legacy search systems so you don’t have to rip and replace. This is a request from a number of our prospects.
Incompatibility exists most prevalently between the two basic information silos that exist in every organization: the business intelligence-data warehousing stack for structured data and the search-content management system stack for unstructured content. Our long term strategy is to merge these two.
You can read the complete interview here. More information about Attivio is here.
Stephen Arnold, May 27, 2008
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
