Search Done Right

Last week, Fast Search and Transfer announced a big push into the Business Intelligence market, with the introduction of their Adaptive Information Warehouse (AIW). This comes a few months after Google and Endeca both announced partnerships with BI vendors. Is Business Intelligence a natural extension for enterprise search platforms?

There are clear overlaps between search and business intelligence. First, each application has the need to access disparate information sources. All of the top enterprise search vendors have developed valuable connectors to many repositories that can be reused for other tasks. Second, the need to normalize this data is common to both applications. And finally, recent breakthroughs in terms of creative techniques to display meta-data visually via the user interface within the context of search (see Vivisimo announcement from May 2006) can be put to good use in a BI application.

But is this enough to see traditional Business Intelligence as a natural and strategically sound extension to search? I believe that there is a strong argument to be made against it, particularly in the approach taken by Fast:

1. Search is primarily about textual content, BI primarily about “numerical” data (in which we include set value data). As a search vendor, free text and language is in our DNA – that is what we focus on processing and interpreting efficiently. Non-textual data is mostly valuable to search as it relates to the textual data. Handling purely numerical data is very far from the search expertise.

2. Search is a broad audience application with a very straightforward work flow. Everybody knows how to launch a search, no training or user manuals are required. On the contrary, BI relies on the creation of complex and intricate reports, requiring specific expertise to produce and interpret. The search “broad audience” perspective can be put to good use to try to democratize BI, but there are inherent limits to this. The abstract nature of numerical data will always limit its use to a small set of experts.

3. Enterprise search is a big enough problem to tackle. The recent Fast announcement reminds me of AltaVista going into the portal business right at the time Google was born. At that time, web search was seen as a niche and search players felt the pressure from their investors to diversify. It really seems that history is repeating itself. From our own observations, the current state of search in the enterprise is dismal, but its potential limitless.

For all these reasons, Vivisimo will not be announcing a replacement solution for traditional BI anytime in the near future. However, Vivisimo is already working on new kinds of “business discovery” tools based on the interpretation of free text data currently ignored by traditional BI tools. We believe these tools will complement traditional BI offerings, not replace them. Vivisimo is currently working with survey research companies, large retailers and call center technology providers to use these tools to automatically interpret free-form customer feedback into actionable items. Unlike traditional BI, these business discovery tools leverage core text-based technologies (entity extraction, search & especially text clustering) and produce output that can be useful to a broad audience, from the entry level information worker to the company CEO.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 9:36 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.