Enterprise Search

Gartner Magic Quadrant 2008 Now Available

If you have not seen it, the new Gartner Magic Quadrant for Information Access - their name for intranet and customer facing search - has been published and is available for viewing on the Gartner web site thanks to a pointer from Microsoft's Analyst Relations page.

The big story, one which must have them fuming in England, is that Autonomy has dropped down a bit, and the combined Microsoft-FAST offerings have moved up a bit. This puts Autonomy a bit higher up on the 'Completeness of Vision' scale - by a few pixels - but a decent quarter-inch below Microsoft on the 'Ability to Execute' scale. Endeca, IBM, ZyLAB and Vivisimo squeaked into the upper right quadrant, while Google moved right to the link splitting the 'Challengers' from the 'Leaders', but ever so close - one could say the Google dot is on the line. It's odd that Google is not higher on the 'Ability to Execute' scale, since that usually means how well funded the company is. Perhaps they are looking at the budget/sales for only the Google appliance; but even then, Steve Arnold's numbers put them above the others on the scale.

Some excellent search products fell off the list this year, as Gartner has changed their methodology. The products we feel still qualify for the report include Dieselpoint, SLI Systems, and X1 Technologies, as well as newcomer Attivio. The article has more details. And as the con artist Fagan said in the play base don Dicken's Oliver Twist, '...if you happen to pass the Tower of London, have a look at the Crown Jewels'.

The Future of Search is Simpler

Gary Szukalski, VP of Field Marketing at Autonomy,  gave a keynote speech at ESS West 2008 entitled "Meaning Based Computing" notable for its lack of vision. He was a replacement for Stouffer Egan, Autonomy's CEO, whose slides he likely used. The talk detailed the difficulties inherent in enterprise search, especially how challenging it can be to understand the full meaning of a word like "dog" or "shred" without context. We live in this world, we understand the difficulty.  While his talk outlined the direction of automatic categorization, alerts, profiles, dynamic and real-time clustering and schemas, it left me wanting real vision and a roadmap from the industry leader. He never rose above the complexity of information processing. 

In a sharp contrast, Google provided more vision in their 10-minute lunch pitch than Autonomy's same old key note speech. Google provided a clear vision: you can be up and operational in one day and search everything.  Simple to use and simple to administer.  In 2008, Google is not the naive implementation that we saw 6 years ago: they have made real progress toward their vision. While other companies are marching to that vision. Dieselpoint's OpenPipeline, Endeca's simple administrative controls, Fast's navigators, Autonomy's categorization, Google is providing the vision. The future is simpler and usable by everyone on the enterprise. We have along way to go - but we can change the business world.  We are moving closer to the vision of many sources of data providing insight and increasing the pace of business decisions.

Our Top 3 Google Search Appliance Tips

Many of the operators available on the public Google site are useful within the Google Search Appliance. Here are a few of the most interesting ones.

1: The tilde prefix (~) is the Thesaurus / Synonym operator:

Instead of searching for
    error

Try searching for:
    ~error

A memory mnemonic, remember that in math the ~ is often used as "approximately equal to" symbol.

2: Dot dot (..) does a range search:

You can do:
    47..49

Or even use it for search years (though not full dates):
    2000..2005

3: And who could forget site: operator, useful for double checking your own spider's indexing of your public site:

For our site as of this writing, Google shows 44 docs that mention 'microsoft':
    site:ideaeng.com microsoft

When you search for 'microsoft' from our home page, you get  gives 48 docs.

Try this on your own site - if the number in your search engine is lower than the Google count, your search is missing something!

There are of course a whole bunch more Google operators, and on the other Google Web Search Help Center, but  some of these tips came from MakeUseOf

 

Search Quality: You Can't Improve What You Don't Measure

In our latest survey of new newsletter subscribers we found that 29% had no formal metrics for measuring quality of search results.  Search metrics allow you to keep search on the right track and can be a powerful tool for managing your systems.  They are a wonderful source for insights and trends.  We thought we would share a couple that we think work well. Many of these are covered in greater depth in Interpreting Your Search Activity Reports in the Enterprise Search newsletter.

• Count the number of people who use search  
• Count the total number of searches  
• Count the number of zero search results  
• User feedback on top 100 searches  
• Track email complaints about search  
• Measure number of clicks on navigators (navigation menu items)  
• Business Goals  
•    
  • Reduce call volume (normallized for growth in customer base) by enabling self-service from search: results are good enough to reduce calls.
  • Reduce e-mail volume (again adjusted for growth in customer base) by enabling self-service from search: results are good enough to reduce e-mails. 
  • Revenue       
  • Add-on revenue       

Some interesting Enterprise search events the week of June 2nd

There are two really interesting events happening next week that might be of interest.

First, Leslie Owens of Forrester is presenting a the Forrester Wave Enterprise Search platform webinar  on Monday morning, June 2 at 8AM. There is a nominal fee, but I think you will find it interesting.

Then, Leslie and several other interesting speakers will be at a free one day seminar hosted by FAST on Wednesday the 4^th in Redwood Shores California at the Sofitel Hotel. In addition to Leslie Owens' presentation on 'Technology Populism', speakers will include Jeff Spataro of Microsoft; Hadley Reynolds of FAST; and senior IT managers from Cisco and National Instruments.  Hadley, by the way, speaks and writes on Search Centers of Excellence and other innovations in the application of enterprise search. Be sure to register for the free FAST Search event.

Updated 2008 Enterprise Search Vendor Roundup

Jan. 10, 2008 - San Jose, CA, USA 

Microsoft announced they were acquiring FAST Search on January 8, forcing New Idea Engineering to amend our January 4th article "2008 Enterprise Search Vendors:  The new 'Fab4 ... and 1/2" (http://www.ideaeng.com/pub/entsrch/2008/number_01/article01.html). The announcement validates our original assessment and reinforces that search is mission critical for corporations, driving Microsoft to invest in a better search technology.

Some Highlights from NIE's 2008 Enterprise Search Vendor Roundup
 
Autonomy IDOL and FAST Search continue to hold the high end. K2 and Ultraseek are finally retiring.
Google's new version 5 appliance has arrived in the enterprise search mainstream.
Endeca is moving from the ecommerce side and had one of the most impressive search demos at ESS West 2007.
Lucene/ Nutch/ Solr (LNS) open source search engines continue to gain customer mindshare.
Microsoft with its acquistion moves in as Tier 1.
IBM and Oracle still not there.
 
Autonomy IDOL and FAST Search continue to hold the high end, evolving into "search platforms" that go beyond traditional drop in applications. The two leaders from earlier this decade, K2 and Ultraseek, are fading.

Google's new version 5 appliance has arrived in the enterprise search mainstream. While the new version won't satisfy every requirement, it addresses many of the earlier integration issues that had held it back. Expect to see the Google logo on a lot more enterprise portals.

Endeca has created some slick administration tools, doing very well in a head-to-head comparison with Autonomy and FAST despite their continued progress in this area.  As the importance of administration continues to increase, we are more enthusiastic about them in the Enterprise space.

Open source tools based on Lucene, including Nutch and Solr (LNS) are increasingly considered by companies, especially in niches that need to micromanage document relevancy and rating. Lucene and its derivatives are increasingly embedded in other software packages and services, to the point that many users won't even realize they're using it.

We had expected IBM to be the next entrant into the "Tier 1" lineup, based on their iPhrase acquisition. To our surprise, when we saw IBM at ESS East 2007, they were featuring one of their older engines, the OmniFind Enterprise Edition. IBM OmniFind is still not one of our new Fab 4 and an 1/2.

Dieselpoint, Intellisearch, Reccomind, ISYS, ZyLAN, Vivisimo, Siderean and Exalead have strong presences in niche markets.
 
To read the full article ... 2008 Enterprise Search Vendors: The New Fab 4 ... and 1/2. http://www.ideaeng.com/pub/entsrch/2008/number_01/article01.html

Google Appliance Growing Up?

 

The newest version of the Google Search Appliance (GSA) is available, and it's starting to look like a pretty decent solution for more and more corporations.

Google released Version 5 provides what they call “Universal Search"  in October. The newest release for the entire GSA line (except the Mini) includes a number of excellent enterprise features including enhanced security; parametric search, Wiki KeyMatch, a social tagging for best bets; and an application called One Box, a search federator tool.

GSA security now includes Windows Integrated Authorization (WIA) and includes a security API to customize special security needs. It handles security both at crawl time and at search time. It fully respects data store security from all sources, so users only see documents, best bets, parametric results, and features which they have permission to view.

The parametric code in Universal Search is based on open source code available from Google (http://code.google.com/p/parametric/). In demos, it looks like most of the parametric demos we've seen; so we'll have to say more once we have a chance to drill down.

The odd feature in this release is the Wiki KeyMatch feature. Essentially it lets any employee tag a search result list by add "best bet" suggestions to the top of the result list for a given query. It looks like anyone can suggest a related or better result for any query. Apparently this has worked well in Google for a while, and Google folks say it's great. Administrators are notified when new tags are added or updated, and the best bet does show who created the tag. As Jimmy Wales says about his Wikipedia product, anyone posting understands that if the best bet is not useful or appropriate it's going to be removed; so in a sense any author who wants his/her best bet to survive, it better be good. I have to admit the corporate manager I’ve talked to are a bit skeptical; but it can potentially start using the 'wisdom of the crowd' to get better results where it works.

OneBox is a search federation application that provides a way to combine results from a number of different corporate data sources, as well as from Google Apps. As one of the Google folks said recently, "One Box is a way of pulling in live data (such as employee info, salesforce.com data, business objects data) right into your search results."

Google has a solution for SharePoint, Documentum, Livelink, and FileNet, as well as to Google Apps. They provide an API so you can write your own, and we're sure third party developers are busy working on then now. The Google provided connectors are free; but third party connectors may be priced depending on how the developer wants to market it.

Finally, Google also seems to have improved their existing "data biasing" to allow administrators to 'query tweak' using URL patterns and document recency.

The only bad news for small users and corporate departments is that the new upgrade and features are not (yet) available for the popular Google Mini.

If you looked at the Google offerings a while ago and they didn’t meet your needs, you may want to take a second look. It looks like they’ve started to come of age in the enterprise search market.

 

 

Is Gartner missing a trend?

The new Gartner 'Magic Quadrant' report for Information Technology, released last month, shows few surprises in the actual vendor chart. But the report goes on to explain that, of the open-source search engines, "none of them are significant enough to threaten the commercial market". They go on to specifically mention Lucene, saying "enterprises don't consider it a significant alternative". We beg to differ.

Gartner does talk about IBM's strong support of Lucene; and they do say that, if IBM invests substantially in the technology, Lucene may reach its potential. However, we see a number of companies already placing their bets on Lucene - although here I am considering the Apache 'Lucene-Solr-Nutch' franchise as a single, related set of tools.  The list of Lucene users we know includes start-up vertical search companies that don't have much money; but we also see some well-funded and growing public companies which are choosing to build their skills in-house for total control over their own search destiny. Netflix, Monster.Com, and Pearson Scott Foresman are just a few of the companies that use Lucene-Solr-Nutch and are incredibly happy with their choice. And more are looking every day.

The open source path may not be right for every company. Lucene is a toolkit, and we tell our customers that "some assembly is required". It is still weak on filters for document formats, it offers weak stemmer support, and has no integrated support for document security. Lucene and Solr don't include a spider/crawler, although Nutch is always available for that. And while there are wrappers for other popular languages, you will probably want some developers who know Java pretty well. But once you have the right skills in-house, it provides pretty good search in a lightweight, portable application.


We agree with Gartner when they say support from a major vendor like IBM would be a major benefit to the Lucene franchise; but we don't think it's necessary. Think about this: Lucene included a parametric search capability months before the Google Search Appliance did. And the Lucene franchise features search term highlighting; completely tunable relevance and a transparent relevance algorithm; and the capability of fine tuning just about everything to work exactly as you want it. It may be a toolkit, but it is sure a pretty good one for many environments.

It's not like Gartner to miss the wave completely; maybe they are just not listening to the same people we've been talking to with in the corporate world.

What's in a name: Branding and Enterprise Search

We've been hearing some interesting stories over the last few months about how users perceive the quality of the results their enterprise search platform delivers - and the news isn't great for some vendors. It seems that if you label your search ‘Powered by Google’, typical corporate users find the results much better - whether the results are really powered by Google or not.

This comes to us anecdotally from a trusted friend and colleague; as well as from a customer of our company who has switched from K2 to Google for search on their large intranet site.

Our friend tells of a user study conducted by and for a large enterprise search vendor, a long-time resident of the prestigious upper right quadrant in the annual Gartner report. This company – let’s call it ‘Vendor X’ - arranged for  groups of users to search enterprise content using two different search engines. One system was labeled with the logo of Vendor X; while the other was labeled 'Powered by Google’ and displayed the Google logo. In fact, both systems used the same search software, that marketing by Vendor X.

Incredibly, users reported that the system labeled 'Powered by Google’ produced much better results than the one powered by Vendor X - even though the results were the same.

The Fallacy of Single-Shot Relevancy

One of the problems that has plagued corporate search for so long is the assumption that a user simply needs to enter a query and the search technology will automagically return the best answers.

It isn't really the corporations' fault - the search vendors have been making this pitch for years. And to make things worse, Google and Yahoo and other web search engines make it look so simple. What most users don't realize is that these internet search services have it easy: there are perhaps tens of thousands of sites that cover most subjects, and no one notices if a few thousand documents are missing from the result list. In the corporate world, you only have one page that contains your CEO's bio, and if that page doesn't come back at the top of a search, you know someone is going to be unhappy.

For a while, companies and vendors tried to push "Advanced Search" as the solution. The logic was "if a user really wants the answer, s/he can drill down into the advanced page". Nope. Wrong again. Some of our customers who survey their web site users report that fewer than 3% of all searches come from the advanced search page. Yet a large percentage of users report they are dissatisfied with their search results. Clearly, this is a failed strategy as well.

We need to find a way to engage the user in a conversation to learn what they are really looking for.

What's the solution?