Pre Oracle InQuira: A Leader in Knowledge Assessment?
July 28, 2014
Oracle purchased InQuira in 2011. One of the writers for Beyond Search reminded me that Beyond Search covered the InQuira knowledge assessment marketing ploy in 2009. You can find that original article at http://bit.ly/WYYvF7.
InQuira’s technology is an option in the Oracle RightNow customer support system. RightNow was purchased by Oracle in 2001. For those who are the baseball card collectors of enterprise search, you know that RightNow purchased Q-Go technology to make its customer support system more intuitive, intelligent, and easier to use. (Information about Q-Go is at http://bit.ly/1nvyW8G.)
InQuira’s technology is not cut from a single chunk of Styrofoam. InQuira was formed in 2002 by fusing the Answerfriend, Inc. and Electric Knowledge, Inc. systems. InQuira was positioned as a question answering system. For years, Yahoo relied on InQuira to deliver answers to Yahooligans seeking help with Yahoo’s services. InQuira also provided the plumbing to www.honda.com. InQuira hopped on the natural language processing bandwagon and beat the drum until it layered on “knowledge” as a core functionality. The InQuira technology was packaged as a “semantic processing engine.”
InQuira used its somewhat ponderous technology along with AskJeeves’ type short cuts to improve the performance of its system. The company narrowed its focus from “boil the ocean search” to a niche focus. InQuira wanted to become the go to system for help desk applications.
InQuira’s approach involved vocabularies. These were similar to the “knowledge bases” included with some versions of Convera. InQuira, according to my files, used the phrase “loop of incompetence.” I think the idea was that traditional search systems did not allow a customer support professional to provide an answer that would make customers happy the majority of the time. InQuira before Oracle emphasized that its system would provide answers, not a list of Google style hits.
The InQuira system can be set up to display a page of answers in the form of sentences snipped from relevant documents. The idea is that the InQuira system eliminates the need for a user to review a laundry list of links.
The word lists and knowledge bases require maintenance. Some tasks can be turned over to scripts, but other tasks require the ministrations of a human who is a subject matter expert or a trained indexer. The InQuira concept knowledge bases also requires care and feeding to deliver on point results. I would point out that this type of knowledge care is more expensive than a nursing home for a 90 year old parent. A failure to maintain the knowledge bases usually results in indexing drift and frustrated users. In short, the systems are perceived as not working “like Google.”
Why is this nitty gritty important? InQuira shifted from fancy buzzwords as the sharp end of its marketing spear to the more fuzzy notion of knowledge. The company, beginning in late 2008, put knowledge first and the complex, somewhat baffling technology second. To generate sales leads, InQuira’s marketers hit on the idea of a “knowledge assessment.”
The outcome of the knowledge marketing effort was the sale of the company to Oracle in mid 2011. At the time of the sale, InQuira had an adaptor for Oracle Siebel. Oracle appears to have had a grand plan to acquire key customer support search and retrieval functionality. Armed with technology that was arguably better than the ageing Oracle SES system, Oracle could create a slam dunk solution for customer support applications.
Since the application, many search vendors have realized that some companies were not ready to write a Moby Dick sized check for customer support search. Search vendors adopted the lingo of InQuira and set out to make sales to organizations eager to reduce the cost of customer support and avoid the hefty license fees some vendors levied.
What I find important about InQuira are:
- It is one of the first search engines to be created by fusing two companies that were individually not able to generate sustainable revenue
- InQuira’s tactic to focus on customer support and then add other niche markets brought more discipline to the company’s message than the “one size fits all” that was popular with Autonomy and Fast Search.
- InQuira figured out that search was not a magnetic concept. The company was one of the first to explain its technology, benefits, and approach in terms of a nebulous concept; that is, knowledge. Who knows what knowledge is, but it does seem important, right?
- The outcome of InQuira’s efforts made it possible for stakeholders to sell the company to Oracle. Presumably this exist was a “success” for those who divided up Oracle’s money.
Net net: Shifting search and content processing to knowledge is a marketing tactic. Will it work in 2014 when search means Google? Some search vendors who have sold their soul to venture capitalists in exchange for millions of jump start dollars hope so.
My thought is that knowledge won’t sell information retrieval. Once a company installs a search systems, users can find what they need or not. Fuzzy does not cut it when users refuse to use a system, scream for a Google Search Appliance, or create a work around for a doggy system.
Stephen E Arnold, July 28, 2014
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