Search Done Right

We don’t have all the details about the latest terrorist attempt on our country but we do know one thing: it was preventable.

President Obama calls it a “mix of human and systemic failure”. Despite a clear warning coming from the terrorist’s father, the state department did not revoke his visa, the NCTC did not put him on the 4,000 people “no fly” list or the 14,000 second screening list and everybody ignored the fact that he was put on the big 550,000 “linked to terrorism” list. Humans, all too human, made a series of bad judgment calls.

After the slips and taboos of SharePoint discussed in my last two blogs, let’s explore the dreams.

In the keynote, one of the speakers demonstrated the following scenario:

1. A business user synchronizes his/her spreadsheet (of sales numbers) with an external database.
2. Offline that business user modifies the spreadsheet.
3. Upon reconnecting to the network, these changes get synchronized with the database which gets automatically modified.
4. These changes are then reflected immediately in charts and stats published on a multitude of web sites.

What was unveiled during the SharePoint 2010 conference has been dissected, commented upon, interpreted, etc. all over the web. So to avoid repeating what has already been said and delve deeper into the SharePoint psyche, after exploring the Freudian slips in my last post, I propose to explore the taboos: what was not talked about during the SharePoint conference?

I was supposed to go to the SharePoint conference but I did not go. I caught the flu. With a 104 fever, shivering under 2 shirts, 3 sweaters and 4 covers, I decided that spreading my germs in Vegas (and collecting some more) was not worth the trip.

Fortunately for me, Microsoft set up a comprehensive conference site with all the sessions, downloadable presentations and videos. It is almost better than being there (I sure hope I can’t get a virus from it). The cherry on the cake is that the site is built on SharePoint 2010 offering a firsthand user experience.

Google just announced some improvements to its search appliance (“New Google Search Appliance Connectors“, “Compare enterprise search relevance using Side-by-Side in Enterprise Labs“). As always with the appliance announcements it’s very interesting to read between the lines. The experimental side-by-side feature looks cool but what really caught my attention is the mention that their SharePoint connector now supports “bulk authorization“. Now, wait, bulk authorization? Didn’t Google just announce support for early binding?

The headline was my father’s reaction to the launch of Wolfram Alpha, the new “answer engine” from Wolfram Research. My father did not like the fact that in many cases WA rewrites your query to find something it can actually answer.

The problem my father has highlighted is that WA can only answer a small portion of the questions asked of it. A lot has been said about its limitations in NLP but I actually see WA’s limitation more related to the data – how it collects it and how it uses it. WA relies on “curated data” and not on the overall web knowledge. It is purely rule-based and not statistical-based.

As an executive, I appreciate the visibility search provides me into what is going on in my company: what employees are working on, what new products or features we are developing, what is said in our wiki, our website or our blogs.

So when I read this article, it dawned on me that the same technologies that are giving insights to executives at Fidelity Investments or Procter & Gamble could prove invaluable to the leader of a certain government.

Here’s the letter I wrote to him. I’ll let you know if I get a response.

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In a recent editorial, Thomas Friedman suggested that the current crisis goes beyond the financial system: it represents a paradigm shift in our conception of growth. For decades, and especially in the 1980s and 90s, growth has been all about “more:” more money, more resources, more consumption. Today, as we reach the limits of this model “more” needs to be replaced by “better” and “smarter:” better, smarter, higher efficiency use of our limited resources.

In many ways this also applies to the information world and may very well explain why “enterprise search” and providers like Vivisimo are doing so well in this difficult economy.

In my last post, The Search Gap – Part 1, I discussed the enormous gap between web search and “behind the firewall” search—i.e enterprise search. Now, as promised, I’ll lay out how you can bridge the search gap in three critical areas—coverage, findability and usability.

Do a simple experiment: Ask yourself or a colleague who works in a large organization this question: “How often do you use a web search engine versus a search engine that is ‘behind the firewall’ (i.e., to find information only available inside your organization)?” The two answers are typically very different. In fact, most internet-savvy people use a web search engine every day. The same people rarely or never use a search engine behind the firewall. But maybe they just don’t need it?