Technology or Methodology?

Yesterday I gave a talk at Enterprise Search Summit - New York on the "Nuts and Bolts of selecting a search engine". My main thesis was this: if you look at the Garnet and Forrester reports on vendors, the usual suspects show up in the top right of the chart: Autonomy, FAST Search, Endeca, IBM and  Google. A good part of the audience at ESS uses one of these systems, yet many are unhappy with their vendor's products. Many are ready to drop one to buy and implement one of the others in the same group. If you're unhappy with one of the leading vendors, why believe that switching to another will make everything better?

Maybe the answer is this: It's not the technology, it's the methodology.

Implementing enterprise search isn't rocket science - after all, you can get a degree in rocket science. Doing enterprise search right is a combination of eduction, training, and sometimes sorcery.