Since my early days at Verity in 1989, I thought search was a pretty cool thing. Verity was an early success in what we now call 'enterprise search' because they were selling an application that let companies (and government agencies) index and search large volumes of digital content. Of course, in those days 'large content' was tens of thousands of documents. Still, Verity had some very cool capabilities including automated hyperlinking between text documents and synchronized image links (both thanks to Abe Lederman, founder of DeepWeb Technologies. When we at Verity first saw HTML links, they seemed pretty old fashioned. But I digress.
Most search before Verity was pretty basic. You typed in a keyword query and got a list of documents that contained your keyword. Oh sure, there were some technologies that let you define synonyms and other basic functionality, but most of it was pretty simple. (By the way, one of the things Verity had even in those early days was 'topics' - structured taxonomies of concepts.. an early day 'concept search'. If you typed in a query for 'New York', it wasn't uncommon for the character-based user interface to ask "New York the City or New York the State?". Very cool, even by today’s standards.
But now, Google is the public web search that so many use – and praise. But John Battelle, while speaking at FASTForward06 last year, likened the Google search interface to a MS-DOS 2.0 DIR command. In MS-DOS, you type DIR and it shows you a list of files. In Google, and other present-day web search engines, you type a query and you get a list of documents.
We call this kind of search within the company Search Dial-Tone. Think POTS: Plain Old Telephone Service - you pick up the phone and you get dial tone. But no caller id, no call waiting, no voicemail. Dial the phone and maybe someone will answer. Heck, after a major disaster, you may not even get that. Search Dial-Tone (POST - Plain Old Search Technology - is just like that: You enter a search and you get results – sometimes lots of results. No suggestions. No best bets. No navigators. No entity recognition. No context. No analytics. Your search found 13,276 hits on your web site? Still can’t find what you want? Good luck with that – keep scrolling.
In all fairness, Google and others are starting to show me more - departments when I search for Stanford, FedEx tracking data when I enter a tracking number, even airline flight information when I enter a flight number. Some free and low-cost engines including the IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition are starting to improve on this ‘Enterprise Search 1.0’ by providing best bets, synonyms and the like – but most queries are pretty much MS-DOS compatible. You pick up the phone and hear the dial tone, but it sure isn’t fancy.
Jump to today: enter Web 2.0, Search 2.0, and Enterprise 2,0. Hundreds (thousands?) of people write every day about how things will be better in the future. On those few occasions when people write about Search 2.0, they mean that time in the future when Google and others will be much better. How? The general consensus is that they will use context.
Think about it: a query has context: what does the word look like (think FedEx tracking numbers); is it misspelled ("Did you mean...?); are both words capitalized (a name perhaps); what language is the query written in?
The user has context as well: where does the searcher live? What other terms has this searcher used recently? What documents has he or she looked at?
The data that is indexed has context: what names are common in the documents? Are there terms that are often near other terms? Has the author written other documents that might be interesting?
Google and its competitors are starting to understand all of these types of context, but it isn't easy. Enterprise Search 2.0, inside of companies, already has access to the context that public search engines can only dream about. Think about it: your employer knows who you are: what your job title is; what department (and city/state/country) you work in, and who else works on the same projects you are working on. They know where you went to school; what degrees you have in which fields; and they know what projects and customers you have worked with. They can easily know what searches you have done on your corporate network; they know which documents you looked at. And they know what people like you found helpful. They have your phone number, your email address, and your vacation schedule. And as companies begin to implement Enterprise 2.0 technologies like blogs, wikis, and other lightweight publishing solutions, companies will have access to all of that as well. All they need to do is use it.
Imagine Enterprise Search 2.0 in action. You enter a person's name, and
at the top of the results, you see a corporate directory entry for that
person, with phone number and email address as a hyperlink. You get a
link to the project he is working on. Type in your company ticket symbol, you get the most recent quote. Search for an internal project name and you have a navigator link to all of the current information on that project.
Newer search technologies like FAST ESP, Autonomy IDOL, IBM OmniFind and others are beginning to offer various levels of this newer, smarter search that understands context. We call that Enterprise Search 2.0, and it's the next big thing in enterprise search. And that's what we're all about here at New Idea Engineering.