Search Done Right

In parallel with our release of version 5.5 of Velocity, we at Vivisimo have been speaking with a number of analysts and reporters. My own comments have focused on two thoughts about the state of enterprise search. A previous post developed the claim that search has grown up.

This post focuses on a second thought: search is spreading its wings. There are various applications in which search has been seen as 10% or even 0% of the challenge, but which are being transformed into search-centric tasks where search is recognized as 50% or 80% of the challenge. Two examples:

• Archiving for compliance and litigation has mostly been seen as a retention and storage challenge, because electronic information was not fully discoverable in the legal sense. Due to changes in the federal rules of civil procedure, electronic information such as email is now fully discoverable. When a lawsuit looms, a company’s first task is figuring out whether they have a problem, which means that company attorneys must efficiently search and evaluate tremendous amounts of electronic information. This is a classic enterprise search challenge, assuming the storage problem is solved.
• Free-form customer feedback, obtained via surveys, inbound email, or other means, has traditionally been analyzed by people, hopefully-inexpensive interns, who read the responses and code them into pre-defined categories. We at Vivisimo just announced a partnership with Foresee Results, an online customer satisfaction measurement firm that we believe will transform the analysis of free-form customer feedback into essentially a search problem, in which thousands of feedback entries can be clustered in their entirety in order to discern the major themes, and alternatively search results can be clustered based on a query such as rude or rudeness (what types of rudeness do our customers report?).

There are other specific applications. Elsewhere, FAST has announced a move into general business intelligence which targets not just text but numeric and other structured data, although my fellow blogger Jerome has expressed skepticism about the fit in that case.

Enterprise search has grown up into a responsible adult, who ambitiously is spreading its wings and nesting in new territories. Expect search to become the dominant method of knowledge access in the future.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 8:40 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.