Keyword Search: Much Ado About Nothing

Recently, Mark Logic's CEO Dave Kellogg wrote Things Not To Do: Declare Your Category Dead, sage advice with a personal story harking back to his days at Ingres. Dave's story is in response to a Larry Hawes post in the Gilbane Group Blog about the recent conference they held in San Francisco. According to Larry, Microsoft's Jeff Fried claimed 'keyword search is dead'.

My first thought was 'of course it is'. There have been reports of the death of keyword search - even of enterprise search itself - for years. Those of us who work with search have long realized that the idea of finding what you want from millions of documents by entering a word or two is totally unrealistic. Modern search technologies provide the tools to engage users in a conversation, to lead them to the best result iteratively using facets, natural language search, entity extraction, and sentiment analysis.

Next, since I actually attended the presentations Jeff gave, I thought back to see if I could remember him making the claim, but sure didn't remember it. I checked with Carl Grimm, who was there with me, and he didn't recall hearing it either. So I decided to check with Jeff, who even went back and checked his presentation to see if he made the claim anywhere. As we talked, we both agreed about the value of other technologies beyond simple keyword search; but he's pretty sure he never made the claim that keyword search is dead.

We can say with some confidence, the reports of the reports of the death of keyword search are greatly exaggerated.