To Search or Not to Search
July 1, 2013
In the Community section of AIIM, the global community of information professionals, we spotted an interesting post: “Search Is Lost Without Found.” The author, having recently attended Information Today’s Enterprise Search Summit, discusses the low turnout and the growing interest level in big data instead of enterprise search.
The gist of the message at the show was the idea that search is an unsustainable business on its own. He explains the speech made by Shawn Shell, Hitachi Consulting VP of its Microsoft Platform Practice. Shell concludes that people do not fundamentally enjoy search because it leaves them in an interim state of pure guesswork.
The author tells us that as much as people enjoy searches that fit a typical action-outcome scenario, there will always be a need for research through the discovery side of search. He continues:
“There’s a reason that sky-cracking brainstorms don’t open in the middle of workflows. It’s because they’re time-resistant, if not defiant of sequential procedures. Circles have taken their lumps lately. I blame the vanishing rotaries on a preoccupation with linear expression — a bias that tends to favor causality at the expense of circuitry. Whatever inspires you to search there is widespread agreement that search is not meant to inspire more searches but bias the outcome towards more actions.”
The age-old conflict between taking immediate action versus spending time researching and reflection while taking pause from action is torn right out of the pages of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and is manifested in search theory. As search remains the main artery of any virtual world, we can only hope that the author is right and a balance between the two poles on the spectrum will be maintained.
Megan Feil, July 01, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
