ZL Systems and TREC
August 13, 2010
I don’t write anything about TREC, the text retrieval conference “managed” by NIST (US Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology). The participants in the “tracks”, as I understand the rules, may not use the data for Madison Avenue-style cartwheels and reality distortion exercises.
The TREC work is focused on what I characterize as “interesting academic exercises.” Over the years, the commercial marketplace has moved in directions that are different from the activities for the TREC “tracks”. A TREC exercise is time consuming and expensive. The results are difficult for tire kickers to figure out. In the last three years, the commercial market is moving in a manner different from academic analyses. You may recall my mentioning that Autonomy had 20,000 customers and that Microsoft SharePoint has tens of millions of licensees. Each license contains search technology and cultivates a fiercely competitive ecosystem to “improve” findability in SharePoint. Google is chugging along without much worry about what’s happening outside of the Googleplex unless it involves Apple, money, and lawyers. In short, research is one thing. Commercial success is quite another.
I was, therefore, interested to see “Study Finds that E-Discovery Using Enterprise-Wide Search Improves Results and Reduces Costs.” The information about this study appeared in the ZL Technologies’ blog The Modern Archivist in June 2010. You can read the story “New Scientific Paper for TREC Conference”, which was online this morning (August 10, 2010). In general information about TREC is hard to find. Folks who post links to TREC presentations often find that the referenced document is a very short item or no longer available. However, you can download the full “scientific paper” from the TREC Web site.
The point of the ZL write up is summarized in this passage:
Using two fully-independent teams, ZL tested the increased responsiveness of the enterprise-wide approach and the results were striking: The enterprise-wide search yielded 77 custodians and 302 responsive email messages, while the custodian approach failed to identify 84% of the responsive documents.
The goose translates this to mean that there’s no shortcut when hunting for information. No big surprise to the goose, but probably a downer to those who like attention deficit disorder search systems.
So what’s a ZL Technologies? The company says:
[It] provides cutting-edge enterprise software solutions for e-mail and files archiving for regulatory compliance, litigation support, corporate governance, and storage management. ZL’s Unified Archive, offers a single unified platform to provide all the above capabilities, while maintaining a single copy and a unified policy across the enterprise. With a proven track record and enterprise clients which include top global institutions in finance and industry, ZL has emerged as the specialized provider of large-scale email archiving for eDiscovery and compliance.
Some information about TREC 2010 appears in “TREC 2010 Web Track Guidelines”. The intent is to describe one “track”, but the information provides some broader information about what’s going on for 2010. The “official” home page for TREC may be useful to some Beyond Search readers.
For more TREC information, you will have to attend the conference or contact TREC directly. The goose is now about to get his feathers ruffled about the availability of presentations that point out that search and retrieval has a long journey ahead.
Reality is often different from what the marketers present in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, August 12, 2010
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