Search Done Right

As an entrepreneur and CEO, I am often asked by interviewees, interviewers, or acquaintances what keeps me up at night. Instead, I wish people would more often ask: What keeps me fired up during the day?

What fires me up is the same as what fires up everyone else in Vivisimo and in search: the world of online information is transforming utterly—for the better—how people learn and discover and profit from information.

To convey this excitement, I’ll offer three anecdotes, two of which are personal. One pertains to a discovery, another to a savings of time and aggravation, and a third is about making lots of money. Now, the “making lots of money” case isn’t mine, so—dear reader—please do not write to me for help with your boat payments.

1. Discovery

few weeks ago I was giving a presentation in Chicago and gave the audience an anecdote about the thrill of search. My 85-year-old father, who was in the audience and doesn’t know much about the web or search, became excited and asked me later for a tutorial. I asked him to pick the name of some ancestor and we’d see what we could find on the web. My father, who was born in Cuba, dug out a piece of paper that a cousin had recently sent him with the names of two 19th century ancestors named Charles Booth and his wife Helen. Now, ‘Charles Booth’ is an unusual name for 19th-century Matanzas, Cuba, which is where they settled after presumably emigrating from England. After a half hour of searching, we stumbled on the fact that the smallest bird in the world, named Mellisuga helenae or bee hummingbird, is actually named for my father’s great grandmother, in whose home the discoverer of the bird, the German-born naturalist Johannes Gundlach, stayed when he arrived in Cuba. Needless to say, my father was thrilled at this discovery, and I no less thrilled that with a few keystrokes we had discovered a family fact that had escaped him during his entire life.

2. Saving Time and Aggravation

Last summer my preteen daugher went to visit her maternal grandmother in another country. Tragically, there was a fire in the home; luckily no one was hurt, but there was much property damage, plus my daughter’s passport was incinerated. What to do? My first reaction was to telephone the consular office of the U.S. embassy in that country. Calling in the afternoon, a recording informed me that inquiries were only handled during a two-hour interval which had already elapsed. Calling the next day, I got a busy signal. Calling again a half hour later, I got another busy signal. Aargh.. An inspiration hit me: go to USA.gov and type in lost passport. The search results page contained a spotlighted link to an FAQ on lost passports, while a spotlighted link to Federal Forms listed the forms needed to request a new passport for a minor child, e.g., an affidavit from the parents. All the needed steps were listed, sparing me tremendous aggravation; everything went smoothly, from the replacement passport to repatriation.

3. Making Money

Among Vivísimo’s corporate clients is a service provider that had a challenging billing problem: an inability to efficiently determine who owed it money and why. We have been told that during a proof-of-concept trial, which involved indexing terabytes of data from email to file shares, the client discovered an email which led to recovering a seven-figure debt. Over the last year, the client has been able to marshall documentary evidence that has enabled it to recover many millions in billings without being challenged by the debtors, since the documentation recovered by the search process proved decisive.

These three personal anecdotes express the thrill that I and many others feel at working in such an impactful, world-changing industry. As a Vivísimo employee, I’m also proud that we enabled all three cases: Clusty.com for web search, USA.gov for government search, and an internal enterprise search for the money-maker example, as well as our own business applications.

[Adapted from a speech at Innovation Works' Annual Community Meeting, hosted by Vivisimo.]

This entry was posted on Friday, June 22nd, 2007 at 2:34 pm 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.