Inside Search: Raymond Bentinck of Exalead, Part 1
February 3, 2010
Editor’s introduction: Raymond Bentinck (who now works at Exalead) and I have discussed—maybe argued about–search and content processing every month or so for several years. He has deep experience in enterprise software, including stints at Verity, IBM and Oracle.
Our chosen field of intellectual combat for this conversation was a restaurant in Florida. On January 26, 2010, he and I engaged in a discussion of the woes that one-size-fit-all search vendors now face. In Europe, some customers want a single company like SAP to provide a full service solution. But SAP has met strong financial resistance due to the costs of this type of approach. In North America, some pundits have pointed out that the explosion of vendors offering bargain basement eDiscovery and customer support versions of their search and content processing technology represent the a new frontier in search. Other consultants tout the open source search solutions. Still others push appliances or search toasters. The text of our most recent discussion appears below:
Raymond, have you been keeping up with the consultants who are pointing out that search is now the equivalent of a discount store like Wal*Mart or Tesco?
I’ve kept abreast of consultants that say that search is a commodity with some amusement. If you think of search as being the ability to search over a companies Intranet without any security requirements and simply bring back some results with no context to the user’s query then they could be right.
But no sensible consultant would ever describe, being able to provide query and precise results over billions of up-to-the minute records including the ability to analyze the effectiveness of a companies mission critical operations as commodity.
Right, what I call azure chip consultants.
That’s a telling phrase. I think consultants often confuse the clients. This adds to the complexity of the decision process in my opinion.
But let me jump back to this point: Exalead is delivering information solutions for our customers today. The solution uses sophisticated data and content processing methods. Exalead’s approach demonstrates just how far search has progressed in the past few years. I think that the Exalead approach delivers the business intelligence layer to perform analytics on how to improve business moving forward, increase operational efficiency, reduce costs and improve margins.
Isn’t Exalead moving beyond traditional search and retrieval?
Yes and no. If you think of search as retrieval of information, on this basic level is does not really matter whether this data are structured or unstructured. In fact, even at Verity we delivered embryonic solutions around CRM for financial services or conflict checking in legal. However, the legacy search engines, in my opinion, are not capable of delivering solutions for the mainstream because of their lack of functionality and their complexity. Exalead is a new generation of solution that has been designed from the ground up to deliver these capabilities. These sort of mission critical business applications go under the heading of what I call Search Based Applications.
Can you give me an example of a search enabled application?
Certainly. One of Exalead’s clients, for example, replaced a traditional solution provided by Business Objects / SAP and Oracle. There were significant savings in license fees because this customer no longer needed the aging Business Objects system. Other savings resulted from trimming the number of Oracle licenses needed to run the older business intelligence system. The Exalead solution is now used by thousands more users who require no training. Exalead also slashed the latency in the system response time by a factor of 100. A query that once took 60 seconds to process and display, now processes in less than a second on a fully utilized hardware infrastructure. In addition, our solution delivered more functionality, halved the production costs, but importantly queries the up-to-the-minute data, not data that were hours or days out of date.
Are you saying that the commodity or open source solutions lack the engineering fire power of the Exalead system?
Yes. Even in traditional enterprise search type solutions, I do not see the word “commodity” used by our clients. Let me give you another example. You seem skeptical.
No, I am not skeptical. I saw a demonstration of the new Exalead system in December 2009, and I was impressed with the low latency and the way in which the system delivered answers, not a list of results.
Right. One of our recent new clients has a user base world-wide in excess of a hundred and fifty thousand and uses search over most of this global firm’s content repositories. The firm is now replacing its legacy enterprise search product, Verity K2.
Wow, Verity dates from the mid to late 1980s. I did not know that big name outfits were still using this technology. Can you give me some details?
I can tell you that this Exalead client was previously a flagship implementation for Verity for many years. This client is swapping out Autonomy / Verity for Exalead because the aging search solution was exceptionally hard to manage. In addition, the aging system was expensive to customize. The client’s engineers could not see how to utilize it to meet new and demanding information retrieval requirements moving forward. A final problem was the time required to fiddle with the Autonomy / Verity system to get it to deliver what the users needed. The long development times created staff frustration.
After several months of intense technical evaluations around the World with all the leading search vendors they chose Exalead. I do not think that they would have undertaken this expensive and time consuming exercise if they thought that search was a commodity problem.
I saw a demonstration of Exalead’s indexing method for video. Is that in production now?
Yes. Exalead has made a demonstration available on our Labs’s site at http://voxaleadnews.labs.exalead.com/ .
This solution indexes radio and video news from around the world in several languages. In addition to this, we extract in real-time relevant entities from the news items such as people, organizations and locations.
We offer what I call New Media search solutions, Exalead is demonstrating with customers such as Rightmove in the UK that we are able to provide next generation information management solutions. When I say “next generation” I mean that Exalead delivers advantageous semantic capabilities and operational benefits. Even after doing this, the Exalead solution reduced costs by 80 percent.
There is a revolution going on around search which has led well informed and respected analysts such as Sue Feldman from IDC to state that: “The next generation of information work will be search based.” You know Sue don’t you?
Yes, I have worked with her and also done some work for her at IDC.
In my opinion, the consultants who still state that search is a commodity are out of touch with what is gaining traction in savvy firms. Exalead has had a record year, and our growth in the midst of the economic downturn has been stronger than in previous years.
In your opinion, why are some consultants ignoring the search-based application revolution?
I think this is one of your key points. Many of the people advising enterprises about search lack the hands-on experience to know what the pitfalls are that will create problems for some of the traditional solutions. Let’s face it. Many of the flagship systems date from the mid 1990s. Exalead is a newer code base, and it was engineered to scale, be agile, and be easy to integrate with existing enterprise systems.
Can you expand on this idea? I am not sure we are on the same page?
Sure, we recently attended a business intelligence and data warehouse conference. all the traditional business intelligence vendors were there. Putting search in BI is a very hot topic within organizations at the moment.
In reality organizations want business intelligence solutions that a professional can use with no user training. Users want to be presented with data in a way that makes sense for them. Few want to do huge amounts of design work upfront that second guesses the questions that users want to ask. Traditional BI systems are not agile. As a result, when the business changes, an ever expanding army of programmers is required to re-engineer the solution. The idea is to deploy a system in weeks or months, not months or years. BI systems have to be able to extract structured data from unstructured content in order to perform both quantitative and qualitative analysis. BI systems have to be flexible in order to meet the needs of a user. BI systems have to be able to work with ever growing volumes of data. Stale data is just not acceptable which means the systems must be able to process new data quickly.
How much BI experience have you tallied?
I have worked in business intelligence for many years. What struck me at this conference was how little the messaging of the traditional vendors has changed and more importantly how ill suited they are to meet the above requirements. The limitations that organizations face around business intelligence are driven not by the limitations of the companies vision but more by the limitations of traditional technologies. In a world where it is a challenge for many organizations to meet simple requirements around query and reporting against operational data without huge investments you know that there are major issues with traditional technologies. The ability to meet these and many more requirements is Exalead’s advantage in business intelligence.
What’s your view of this trend that a customer can buy a one size fits all or a very narrow solution from the same vendor?
A customer can buy a one size fits all solution but only if the vendor has a one size fits all product. An appliance is not a one size fits all solution. The appliance becomes a spider in the center of a Web of customized code. An open source search solution is a box of components, a bit like the old Fast Search & Transfer technology. The licensee either assembles the solution or pays a lot of money for engineers to build the solution.
Don’t some vendors let marketing promise the world and then hope the engineers can code what’s just been sold?
Absolutely.
Some vendors have solutions that were designed to be easy to deploy for simple needs but customers hit the wall when they start to expand their requirements or push the product into other areas. Other vendors have more advanced capabilities but they take a huge amount of resources to deploy and lots of difficult customization, often with limited success. These more complex solutions tend not to be widely implemented outside of the core initial requirement.
At Exalead, it is striking how usage of an Exalead-enabled solution jumps. Many traditional information systems seem to turn off large segments of the user population in an organization.
What’s the angle for Exalead?
Our platform is unique in having the same core platform that works on a single laptop for desktop search that scales to millions of users and billions of documents on, for example, our showcase Web search site, by new media companies to provide next generation search based applications, by organizations to provide internal and external search and in ever increasing numbers by organizations to allow them to build agile solutions to retrieve mission critical data from operational databases through to business intelligence, data Warehouses and master data management.
I disagree. How can a single vendor handle the rigors of a foreign language search system with a system that lacks the technical support to deliver on what the marketing folks promise?
One of the frustrating things when I worked for some software vendors was that some prospective clients could not believe whether a capability in the product was reality or just an overblown marketing claim. Some vendors have and still make some unbelievable claims around the capabilities of their products. As people’s knowledge has not been as great around search as say traditional databases or business intelligence solutions, these claims have too often been taken on face value by customers and some analysts.
Why should I believe Exalead?
First, you know me, and you know that I focus on demonstrable evidence of the capabilities of a system.
Second, one of the refreshing things about Exalead is that our marketing is very conservative. Our marketing team never claims something that has not either come from an actual customer’s implementation or been passed directly by our engineers as a capability that the solution can and does deliver. It seems quite obvious but this is not how many marketing departments operate in the industry which has in the past been dominated by “snake-oil” marketing.
This doesn’t of course mean that we promise to deliver less than our competitors. It simply means that we have the proven technology to match our promises.
This is the end of Part 1 of the interview with Mr. Bentinck, Exalead. Part 2 appears on February 5, 2010.
Stephen E Arnold, February 3, 2010
I wrote this post without any compensation. However, Mr. Bentinck, who lives in a far off land, offered to buy me haggis, and I refused this tasty bribe. Ah, lungs! I will report the lack of payment to the National Institutes of Health, an outfit concerned about alveoli.
Exclusive Interview: Digital Reasoning
February 2, 2010
Tim Estes, the youthful founder and chief technologist, for Digital Reasoning, a search and content processing company based in Tennessee, reveals the technology the is driving the company’s growth. Mr. Estes, a graduate of the University of Virginia, tackled the problem of information overload with a fresh approach. You can learn about Digital Reasoning’s approach that delivers a system that “deeply, conceptually searches within unstructured data, analyzes it and presents dynamic visual results with minimal human intervention. It reads everything, forgets nothing and gets smarter as you use it.”
Mr. Estes explained:
Digital Reasoning’s core product offering is called “Synthesys.” It is designed to take an enterprise from disparate data silos (both structured and unstructured), ingest and understand the data at an entity level (down to the “who, what, and wheres” that are mentioned inside of documents), make it searchable, linkable, and provide back key statistics (BI type functionality). It can work in an online/real-time type fashion given its performance capabilities. Synthesys is unique because it does a really good job at entity resolution directly from unstructured data. Having the name “Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab” misspelled somewhere in the data is not a big deal for us – because we create concepts based on the patterns of usage in the data and that’s pretty hard to hide. It is necessarily true that a word grounds its meaning to the things in the data that are of the same pattern of usage. If it wasn’t the case no receiving agent could understand it. We’ve figured out how to reverse engineer that mental process of “grounding” a word. So you can have Abdulmutallab ten different ways and it doesn’t matter. If the evidence links in any statistically significant way – we pull it together.
You can read the full-text of this exclusive interview with Tim Estes on the ArnoldIT.com site in the Search Wizard Speak series. You can get more information about Digital Reasoning from the company’s Web site.
The Search Wizards Speak series provides the largest collection of free, detailed information about major enterprise search systems.Why pay the azure-chip consultants for sponsored listings, write ups prepared by consultants with little or no hands on experience, and services that “sell” advertorials. You hear in the developer’s, founders, and CEO’s own words what a system does and how it solves content-related problems.
Stephen E Arnold, February 2, 2010
No one paid me to write about my own Web site. I will report this charitable act to the head of the Red Cross.
Exclusive Interview with Ana Athayde of Spotter
January 19, 2010
Search solutions have the attention of some executives who want actionable information, not laundry lists of results. I learned about an information retrieval company that I knew nothing about from Ana Athayde. Ms. Athayde developed Spotter as a consequence of her work in business intelligence for a large international organization. She told me, “Laundry lists are not often helpful to a business person.” I agree.
Spotter is what I would describe as a next-generation content processing company. The firm’s technology combines content acquisition, content processing, and output generation in a form tailored to a business professional. Spotter’s chief technology officer (Olivier Massiot) previously worked at the pioneering content processing company, Datops SA.
In an exclusive interview on January 18, Ana Athayde, the founder of Spotter (based in Paris with offices several European cities and the US), provides insight into her vision for next-generation information retrieval. She described the approach her firm takes for customers with an information problem this way:
Our clients ask for strategic input on a brand or market; they require more than a general alert and subject monitoring as provided by the services of popular search engines. Spotter clients expect to know more about their customers and what motivates them, learn about their company’s reputation, and about the current risk pervasive in their environment; not simply obtain an internet search-result report. Our clients need deep dive analysis for decision-making, not just a simple dashboard tool and quantitative graphic displays. They want to be able to interpret what it all means and not just receive a simple data-dump. Spotter provides content analysis and leading edge solutions that meet our customers’ analytical needs such as the ability to map and analyze information pertinent to their business environment, so as to gain a strategic business advantage and make new discoveries. Our solutions solve complex problems and deploy these results throughout the enterprise in a form that makes the information easy to use.
A number of companies are providing knowledge management and business intelligence services that output reports. I asked Ms. Athayde, “What’s the Spotter difference?” She said:
I think the key point we try to make clear is our “bundle”; that is, we deliver a solution, not a collection of puzzle pieces. Our ability to capture, monitor and analyze decisions and their impact requires rich, higher order meta data constructs. Many companies such as Autonomy, Microsoft, and Oracle also promise similar services. But once this has been done, the process of information toward decision is not complete. The main competitive advantage of Spotter is to be able to provide to its clients a full decision-making solution which includes, as I mentioned, analytics and our decision management system… Our solution is engineered to link efficiency and quality control throughout the content processing “chain.”
You can read the full interview with Ms. Athayde on the ArnoldIT.com’s Search Wizards Speak features. For more information about Spotter, visit the firm’s Web site at www.spotter.com. Search Wizards Speaks provides one of the most comprehensive set of interviews with search and content processing vendors available. There are now more than 44 full text interviews. The information in these interviews provides a different slant than the third party “translators” who attempt to “interpret” how a search system works and “explain” a particular vendor’s positioning or approach. The Search Wizards Speak series is a free service from ArnoldIT.com lets you read the full text of key players in the search and content processing sector. Primary source material is the first place to look if you want facts, not fluff.
Stephen E Arnold, January 19, 2010
Full disclosure. Spotter’s sales manager tried to give me a mouse pad. I refused. As a result, no one paid me anything to chase down Ms. Athayde, interview her, and go through the hoops needed to understand the Spotter system. Because the Spotter team seemed quite Euro-centric, I will report my sad state of non compensated work to the US Department of State. An organization sensitive to the needs, wants, and desires of non US people and entities.
Exclusive Interview with Exorbyte CTO
November 11, 2009
An exclusive interview with Exorbyte’s founder and chief technical officer, Benno Nieswand, is now available in the Search Wizards Speak series. Exorbyte makes high-performance search software for most databases and structured data format. The company has been expanding in the US market, and it has been attracting quite a bit of attention in the last few months.
In the exclusive interview, Mr. Nieswand said:
Half of our implementations occur in back-office processes, where error-tolerance increases automation rates. One example: A healthcare claims processing center handles inbound documents (40,000 / day) and other processes (like electronic status inquiries) for over 120 health insurance plans. Matching claims with procedure codes, patient records, and other data types can be very difficult to fully automate. They saved 1 Million USD in two years by increasing the automation rates through our error-tolerant data matching with their central data repository. The other half of our implementations are systems with user interaction, like e-commerce search for which we have developed leading search products such as the SearchNavigator, an incremental search AJAX framework.
In the interview he revealed:
Over the last year Exorbyte went 64-bit, which led to a significant increase in speed of our core algorithms. In addition we added improvements in navigation generation (faceted search) and entity extraction. Besides the continuous improvement of our search engine, Exorbyte developed a data quality solution that flexibly handles data quality tasks. It can be applied to processing address enhancement, deduplication, dictionary collection, document processing and more. The underlying MatchMaker search empowers it to achieve excellent results for each of these tasks. Our core algorithms also were enhanced by the capability to match things like “nieswandkonstnzbenno” with “Benno Nieswand, Konstanz” which is called Block-Edit-Distance calculation pertaining the same speed as for regular Levenshtein calculation. This greatly improves single field entry support. We use this for CRM applications for instance.
For more information about Exorbyte, visit the company’s Web site at http://www.exorbyte.com. For the full text of the interview, navigate to http://www.arnoldit.com/search-wizards-speak/exorbyte.html.
Stephen Arnold, November 11, 2009
In theory, the next time I am in Germany, the Exorbyte team will feed me Gans auf elsaesser Art and shower me with euros. In theory, of course. Notify the Senate Police that I am responding to promises of goose cuisine. Wow, I am delighted I admitted this. I am not sure about the goose meal, however.
Exclusive Interview with CTO of BrightPlanet Now Available
October 13, 2009
William Bushee, BrightPlanet’s Vice President of Development and the company’s chief technologist, spoke with Stephen E. Arnold. The exclusive interview appears in the Search Wizards Speak series. Mr. Bushee was among the first search professionals to tackle Deep web information harvesting. The “Deep Web” refers to content that traditional Web indexing systems cannot access. Deep Web sites include most major news archives as well as thousands of specialized sources. These sources typically represent the best, most definitive content sources for their subject area. For example, in the health sciences field, the Centers for Disease Control, National Institutes of Health, PubMed, Mayo Clinic, and American Medical Association are all Deep Web sites, often inaccessible from conventional Web crawlers like Google and Yahoo. BrightPlanet supported the ArnoldIT.com analysis of the firm’s system. As a result of this investigation, the technology warranted an in depth discussion with Mr. Bushee.
The wide ranging interview focuses on BrightPlanet’s search, harvest, and OpenPlanet technology. Mr. Bushee told Search Wizards Speak: “As more information is being published directly to the Web, or published only on the Web, it is becoming critical that researchers and analysts have better ways of harvesting this content.”
Mr. Bushee told Search Wizards Speak:
There are two distinct problems that BrightPlanet focuses on for our customers. First we have the ability to harvest content from the Deep Web. And second, we can use our OpenPlanet framework to add enrichment, storage and visualization to harvested content. As more information is being published directly to the Web, or published only on the Web, it is becoming critical that researchers and analysts have better ways of harvesting this content. However, harvesting alone won’t solve the information overload problems researches are faced with today. The answer to a research project cannot be simply finding 5,000 raw documents, no matter how good they are. Researchers are already overwhelmed with too many links from Google and too much information in general. The answer needs to be better harvested content (not search), better analytics, better enrichment and better visualization of intelligence within the content – this is where BrightPlanet’s OpenPlanet framework comes into play. While BrightPlanet has a solid reputation within the Intelligence Community helping to fight the “War on Terror” our next mission is to be known as the commercial and academic leaders in harvesting relevant, high quality content from the Deep Web for those who need content for research, business intelligence or analysis.
You can read the full text of the interview at http://www.arnoldit.com/search-wizards-speak/brightplanet.html. More information about the company’s products and services is available at http://www.brightplanet.com. Mr. Bushee’s technology has gained solid support from some professional researchers and intelligence agencies. BrightPlanet has moved “beyond search” with its suite of content processing technology.
Stephen Arnold, October 13, 2009
Exclusive Interview with SurfRay President
September 29, 2009
SurfRay has come roaring back into the search and content processing sector. SurfRay, like many other companies, had to tighten its belt and straighten its tie in the wake of the global financial turmoil. With the release of new versions of Ontolica (a search system that snaps into SharePoint) and MondoSearch (a platform independent Web site search solution), SurfRay is making sales again. ArnoldIT.com spoke with Søren Pallesen about the firm’s new products. In a wide ranging interview, Mr. Pallesen, a former Gartner Group consultant, said:
SurfRay’s mission is to deliver tightly packaged search software solutions for businesses to provide effective search for both internal and external users. With Packaged we mean easy to try, install and use. Our vision is to be our customer’s first choice for packaged enterprise search solutions and to become the world’s third largest search solution provider in the world measured on number of paying business customers by 2012. The last six months have been an exciting time for SurfRay. I took over as CEO; we significantly increased investment in product development and an ambitious expansion of the organization. This has paid off. SurfRay is profitable, and we have released new versions of our core products. Ontolica is now in version 4.0, including a new suite of reporting and analytics, and MondoSearch 5.4 is in beta for a Q4 release. As a profitable company we are in the fortunate position to be able to fund our own growth and we are expanding in North America among other by hiring more sales people as well as formation of a Search Expert Center in Vancouver, Canada that will serve customers across the Americas. We are also expanding in Europe most recently with formation of SurfRay UK and Ireland, allowing us to expand sales and support with local people on the ground in this important European market.
When asked about the difference between MondoSearch and Ontolica, Mr. Pallesen told me:
Customers that buy our products typically fall into a number of usage scenarios. Simply put Ontolica solves search problems inside the firewall and MondoSearch outside the firewall. Firstly customers with SharePoint implementations look for enhanced search functionality, and turn to our Ontolica for SharePoint product. Secondly, businesses that do not use SharePoint but have the need for an internal search solution on an intranet, file servers, across email, applications and other sources buy Ontolica Express and use it in combination with Microsoft Search Server Express for simple single server installation or Micro Search Server for multiple load balanced server installations. Thirdly, customers with the need for robust and highly configurable web site search buy MondoSearch. Especially popular with businesses that want to implement up- and cross selling on their search results page.
You can read the full text of the interview in the Search Wizards Speak series on ArnoldIT.com. For more information about SurfRay, visit the company’s revamped Web site at http://www.surfray.com.
Stephen Arnold, September 29, 2009
Exclusive Interview Gaviri Founder
September 8, 2009
One of the most interesting aspects of the Beyond Search Web log in general and the Search Wizards Speak feature in particular is learning about those who invent search systems.
I had an opportunity to sepak with Emeka Akaezuwa in the spare student union at Drexell University not long ago. Dr. Akaezuwa struck me as a remarkable individual. First, he made the trek from his office near New York City to Philadelphia. Second, I learned that he used to work at Dow Jones & Co., laboring on the firm’s search and retrieval systems. Third, I found that he had a PhD and was contributing his time to help young students get their arms around computers and their potential.
You can read the full text of my interview with Dr. Akaezuwa in the Search Wizards Speak feature on ArnoldIT.com. Search Wizards Speak is the single most comprehensive collection of interviews with the movers and shakers in search and content processing.
Dr. Akaezuwa’s Universal SearchOS impressed me. I watched as he took his wristwatch, connected it to my laptop via a USB cable, and indexed my computer. I made the observation that some law enforcement and intelligence agencies might be intersted in the technology. The SearchOS indexed my netbook in a matter of minutes. He said, “Now you can use the data in the Gaviri index to search for documents on your PC.”
SearchOS is available in other “flavors” as well. I have been testing the desktop version since we met at Drexell. One of its most useful features is the ability to “point” the indexing system at an archive of Outlook or Outlook Express email. The system makes those messages and their attachments searchable. Very useful.
The system can be deployed like other enterprise search systems. I asked Dr. Akaezuwa if the SearchOS system could cluster and generate facets. He laughed and told me, “The system is very versatile. Yes, we can make those features available to you if you want them.”
One point Dr. Akaezuwa made in his intervew was:
SearchOS can index so many documents without additional servers because of its Sandbox, Distributed Indexing Architecture. Let us take a behind-the-firewall setting with one thousand users and maybe six servers. Each user indexes all the documents within their sphere of search influence (desktops, portable storage devices, etc.) using their PC or laptop. If we assume that each user has three million documents, we would index three billion documents. And if each of the six servers has fifty million documents, we would index 300 million documents on the servers. Indexing is distributed on each user’s machine. By design, SearchOS can index as many documents as are available on a device. We did not test on the specific hardware configuration you mentioned, but SearchOS’ processing throughput on a dual core processor is about 3,000 documents a minute. Keep in mind that SearchOS does full-text, not partial-text, indexing so the number may be less if a system has many large-size documents (over 500 MB). The software has a CPU utilization throttle that allows a user or a sys admin to power-up or decelerate content processing throughput to match available system resources. SearchOS not only morphs to user contexts but also can be scaled to a device’s content processing capabilities. Device-scaling – which I did not mention as one of what sets us apart – is necessary given the array of systems – from resource-challenged PDAs to high-powered servers that SearchOS must run on.
If you want more information about Dr. Akaezuwa’s system, navigate to http://www.gaviri.com. The full text of the interview is here.
Stephen Arnold, September 8, 2009
Francois Schiettecatte, FS Consulting
June 1, 2009
Through a mutual contact, I reconnected with François Schiettecatte, a search engine expert with other computer wizard skills in his toolbox. Mr. Schiettecatte worked on a natural language processing project in the late 1990s. He shifted focus and was a co-founder of Feedster.com. He told that he had contributed to a number of interesting projects and revealed that he was working on a new search and content processing system.
Mr. Schiettecatte consented to an interview. I spoke with him on May 29, and I put the full text of our discussion in the ArnoldIT.com Search Wizards Speak collection. You can find that series of interviews with influential figures in search and content processing here.
Mr. Schiettecatte and I had a lively discussion and he offered some interesting insights into the trajectory of search and retrieval. Let me highlight two of his comments and invite you to read the full text of the discussion here.
In response to a question about the new start ups entering the search and retrieval sector, Mr. Schiettecatte said:
You can apply different search approaches to different data sets, for example traditional search as well as NLP search to the same set of documents. And certain data set will lend themselves more naturally to one type of search as opposed to another. Of course user needs are key here in deciding what approaches work best for what data. I would also add that we have only begun to tackle search and that there is much more to be done, and new companies are usually the ones willing to bring new approaches to the market.
We then discussed the continuing interest in semantic technology. On this matter, Mr. Schiettecatte offered:
More data to search usually means more possible answers to a search, which means that I have to scan more to arrive at the answer, improved precision will go a long way to address that issue. A more pedestrian way to put this is: “I don’t care if there are about a million result, I just want the one result”. Also, having the search engine take the extra step in extracting data out of the search results and synthesizing that data into a meaningful table/report. This is more complicated but I has the potential to really save time in the long run.
For more information about Mr. Schiettecatte’s most recent project, read the full text of the interview here.
Stephen Arnold, June 2, 2009
Exclusive Interview with Bjorn Laukli, Comperio Search
May 28, 2009
I met Bjorn Laukli about nine years ago. At that time he was the chief technical officer of Fast Search & Transfer. In February 2008 I had Fast Search executives slated to participate in the Search Wizards Speak series here, but the Microsoft deal was underway and the lawyers pulled the plug. I ran into Mr. Laukli at a recent meeting, and I learned that he is now affiliated with Comperio Search, a specialist in the Fast Enterprise Search Platform. I was able to get some of his time on May 26, 2009. The result is a Search Wizards Speak interview. Highlights of the conversation with Mr Laukli included:
An observation that consolidation in the enterprise search sector will continue. Mr. Laukli said:
I think you will continue to see some consolidations, Microsoft acquiring FAST, Omniture buying Mercado etc. This trend will continue as larger companies are trying to strengthen their position within search, bring in new technologies that will bring value to their overall offering, or increasing their customer base.
He also said about the number of new companies entering the search sector:
Certainly, there are many new companies entering the search and content processing space. I still feel there are opportunities for most of them to succeed as long as they are able to differ themselves in some ways. This can be done either by focusing on certain segments of the market, or, deliver new capabilities as an addition to existing platforms.
You can read the full interview on Search Wizards Speak here. More information about Comperio, a Fast Certified Partner, is available from www.comperiosearch.com.
Stephen Arnold, May 28, 2009
Exclusive Interview: Donna Spencer, Enterprise Systems Expert
April 20, 2009
Editor’s Note: Another speaker for what looks like a stellar conference agreed to an interview with Janus Boye. As you know, the Boye 09 Conference in Philadelphia takes place the first week in May 2009, May 5 to May 7, 2009, to be precise. Attendees can choose from a number of special interest tracks. These include a range of topics; including strategy and governance, Intranet, Web content management, SharePoint, user experience, and eHealth. Click here for more conference information. Janus Boye spoke with Donna Spencer on April 16, 2009.
Ms. Spencer is a freelance information architect, interaction designer and writer. She plans how to present the things you see on your computer screen, so that they’re easy to understand, engaging and compelling: Things like the navigation, forms, categories and words on intranets, websites, web applications and business systems.
The full text of the interview appears below.
Why is it so hard for organizations to get a grip on user experience design?
I don’t know that this is necessarily true. There are lots of organizations creating awesome user experiences. Of course, there are a lot who aren’t creating great experiences, but it isn’t because they can’t get a grip on user experience, it is because they care more about themselves than about their customers. If they really cared about their customers they’d do stuff to make their experiences great – and that’s possible without even knowing anything formal about user experience. But because they don’t care about their customers, they will fail, as they should…
Is content or visual design most important to the user experience?
Content (or functionality) is ultimately what people visit a website, intranet or application for. So it’s really, really important to get that right. If the core of the product is bad, it isn’t going to work.
But the visual design is often the part that helps people to get to the content. If the layout is poor, the colours and contrast awful and the site looks like it was designed in 1995, that’s going to stop people from even trying.
So both are important, though if I ever had to choose, I’d go for great content.
Is your book on card sorting really going to be released in 2009?
Yes, by the time the conference is on, there should be real, printed books. 150-odd pages of card sorting goodness. I hear that it should be out around 28 April. Really. I promise.
Does Facebook actually offer a better user experience after the redesign?
That’s a really interesting question. I can only speak for myself, but the thing that struck me about the redesign is that all of a sudden Facebook feels like a different beast. It used to be a site where friends were, but also where there were events, and groups and silly apps. Now it just feels like twitter that you can reply to. It feels like they have done a complete turn-around on who they actually are.
So for me the experience is worse. I can get a better idea of what my friends are doing, but I do that via twitter. Now it’s much harder for me to experience groups, events and all the other things we used to do there. I’m definitely using it less.
Why are you speaking at a Philadelphia web conference organized by a company based in Denmark?
Because they rock! But really, their core business overlaps a lot with what I do. I’m interested in the content the conference offers and I think my experience offers a lot to the attendees. Plus I’ve never been to Philly, and travelling to new places is a wonderful learning experience.
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