Enterprise Search Sourcebook 2008

COMMENTARY Enterprise Search: TRENDS FOR 2008 BY THERESA REGLI aralleling politics in the run-up to an election year, enterprise search in 2007 was full of more hype than substance. There were declarations of search being passé, even “dead,” as vendors attempted to look new and fresh to their prospects, declaring their products “Information Access Platforms” rather than just plain old search engines. Don’t let yourself be fooled: Underlying search and retrieval technology hasn’t changed much, though it is better at fundamentals like indexing and clustering. Overall, the search marketplace continues to surprise, sometimes delight, and often obfuscate prospective customers. Nevertheless, based upon the research we’ve done at CMS Watch for our Enterprise Search Report, some key trends are emerging. Navigating Search The search vendor Endeca may have applied for patents on “guided navigation,” but while they popularized it, the reality is that nearly every vendor provides some degree of results categorization, be it clustering, browsable 26 ENTERPRISE SEARCH SOURCEBOOK 2008 p categories, or another approach. Distilling terms for navigation is relatively easy when the source is structured content or when metadata can provide guidance, but it gets far more difficult when unstructured content is in the mix. Vendors frequently differentiate by showcasing auto-extraction facilities that glean facets and terms from your corpus without you having to tag content. But based on the customers we’ve talked with in our research for the Enterprise Search Report, this is met with varying degrees of success. You’ll want to test such claims with your own content before proceeding—know that auto-extraction and categorization are still relatively hit-or-miss. The nature of language itself is inherently baffling. Humans often cannot make sense of what something means; software doesn’t do much better. Better to invest in a metadata strategy first and then train your software based on that. Analyzing Search What is management without measurement? Seems obvious, but until recently most search tools had no

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Enterprise Search Sourcebook 2008

Enterprise Search Sourcebook 2008 Contents Editor’s Note Publisher’s Note Findings and Figures Why Enterprise Search Will Never Be Google-y Searching for Search Usability Your Users Are Talking to You What’s Your Search Story? Search Is Dead—Now What? Delivering on the Promise of Enterprise Search Taming Multiple Search Engines in Your Organization Enterprise Search: Trends for 2008 Enterprise Search Seen From the Inside Open Source Search: Elixir or Poison? Avoiding the Big Mistakes in Search Semantic Search Takes Root in the Enterprise E-Discovery Essentials: The Rules You Need to Know SharePoint Search: An Enterprise Contender? Integrating Security Into Your Enterprise Search Infrastructure Engineering a Better Search Infrastructure Letting End Users Ask the Questions, Stat! The Power of Knowledge Legal Research Using Enterprise Search: A Developer’s View From Treading Water to Full Steam Ahead Pulling Out All the Stops With Midas A Natural Search Solution An Incremental Approach to Improving Enterprise Search The Enterprise Search Sourcebook Showcase Directory Index to Advertisers and Companies Mentioned

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