Insights from Search Pro Dave Hawking
November 7, 2014
Search-technology expert Dave Hawking is now working with Microsoft to improve Bing. Our own Stephen Arnold spoke to Mr. Hawking when he was still helping propel Funnelback to great heights. Now, IDM Magazine interviews the search wizard about his new gig, some search history, and challenges currently facing enterprise search in, “To Bing and Beyond.”
Anyone interested in the future of Bing, Microsoft, or enterprise search, or in Australian computer-science history, should check out the article. I was interested in this bit Hawking had to say about ways that tangled repository access can affect enterprise search:
“Access controls for particular repositories are often out of date, inappropriate, and inconsistent, and deployment of enterprise search exposes these problems. They can arise from organisational restructuring, staff changes or knee-jerk responses to unauthorised accesses. As there are usually a large number of repositories, rationalising access controls to ensure that search results respect policies is a lot of work.
“Organisations vary widely in their approach to security: some want security enforced with early binding (recording permissions at indexing time), others want late binding, where current permissions are applied when query result are displayed, or a hybrid of the two.
“This choice has a major impact on performance. Another option is ‘translucency’, where users may see the title of a document but not its content, or receive an indication that documents matching the query exist but that they need to request permission to access them. As well these security model variations, organisations vary in their requirements for customization, integration and presentation, and how results from multiple repositories should be prioritized, tending to make enterprise search projects quite complex.”
Eventually, standards and best practices may spread that will reduce these complexities. Then again, perhaps technology now changes too fast for such guidelines to take root. For now, at least, experts who can skillfully navigate this obstacle-strewn field will continue to command a pretty penny.
Cynthia Murrell, November 07, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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