Oracle Tahiti Is No Vacation

September 29, 2009

Oracle and its various search systems have dropped off my radar. Unfortunately I received a call from a former colleague asking me a question about SES 10g configuration. I thought I had downloaded documentation for this system, but I think the downloading tool went south and I never mustered the energy to try and snag the Oracle docs. Latency on the Oracle Web site has been an issue for me in rural Kentucky. I navigated to Tahiti, which you can access at http://tahiti.oracle.com/. I tried a number of search strings. The search result for “Oracle search” was a blank screen. Another of my queries produced this remarkable result list:

I then tried just the search string “search”. Here’s what I received:

Several aspects of these queries left me dumbfounded:

First, why is the search system unable to return hits about Secure Enterprise Search, Ultra Search, search, and text retrieval?

Second, why are these two result lists so dissimilar. Both results were generated by Tahiti and I have zero idea why the results vary.

Third, what happened to relevance, snippets, facets, and other useful features that I saw in a search system used for Oracle’s marketing literature. I think that system was provided by Siderean Software. Even TripleHop can produce more meaningful results.

I thought IBM had the blue ribbon for frustrating search systems. I may have to revise that opinion.

Stephen Arnold, September 29, 2009

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Database, News, Search, Technology, Text processing

Comments

One Response to “Oracle Tahiti Is No Vacation”

Michal Kopec on October 28th, 2009 12:45 pm

Hi Arnold – I work in the Oracle Web Architecture – we just have a conversation on your Tahiti experience (or lack thereof) and want to understand the issue better, The two results sets you refer to.

The left screenshot (oracle results) is the tahiti search home page with no query executed. The right (oracle results 2) screenshot shows the tahiti search results page with “search” query executed. My initial impression is that it is comparing apples – the (tahiti.oracle.com home page) to oranges (tahiti.oracle.com search results page for “search”) – and this is why the two are so dissimilar. Please let me know if this clarifies. Aside I’d love to hear more about your tahiti.oracle.com and Oracle documentation search experience. Cheers, Michal

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.