An Enterprise Search Case Studies Is Like Hunting for Digital Truffles
July 15, 2014
The job hunters, experts, and consultants in the LinkedIn enterprise search discussion groups have been looking for positive use cases related to enterprise search. Finding a success story that one can verify is similar to hunting truffles. Keep you eye on the pig, or the truffle will disappear.
I did come across one use case published in the Italian Journal of Library and Information Science. You can find it at http://bit.ly/1juFaWi. The title of the paper is “Using a Google Search Appliance (GSA) to search digital library collections: a case study of the INIS Collection Search.” The problem search system was BASISPlus, now a product marketed and mostly “frozen” by OpenText.
The original version of BASIS was created at Battellle Memorial Institute in the late 1960s. Battelle spun out BASIS and Information Dimensions was the result. In 1998, OpenText bought BASIS, and I don’t think there has been much modernization of the system in the last couple of decades.
Yep, that’s an old school mainframey type system. A colleague and I used BASIS when it was an Information Dimensions’ product to provide data management, report, and search functionality to a Bell Communications Research (a chunk of what was Bell Labs) system that was used by the seven Baby Bells for a number of years.
My team and I loved big iron and FORTRAN. We stuffed the IBM MVS TSO system with some tasty BASIS sausage in 1983.
Well, the use case explains that BASIS was not the solution today’s users required. The fix was to license the Google Search Appliance. You can get a taste of the GSA’s license and fail over cluster costs at www.gsaadvantage.gov. Prepare yourself for sticker shock.
Keep in mind that “positive” has a spectrum of meanings determined by the reader’s context. The solution is the Google Search Appliance. You know this product as a search toaster…sort of. The advantages and disadvantages section of the use case hammers on the good parts and tiptoes around the thorns.
Stephen E Arnold, July 15, 2014
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3 Responses to “An Enterprise Search Case Studies Is Like Hunting for Digital Truffles”
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