Enterprise Search

KMWorld/ESS West moves to Washington DC 2010

Andrew McAfee of MIT and Harvard fame presented a great keynote last week at what may turn out to be the last ESS West. InfoToday has announced that KMWorld, and probably the enterprise Search Summit, will take place in Washington, DC, next Fall rather than in San Jose. ESS East, traditionally held in New York in May. While held at a smaller venue - the midtown Hilton Hotel - ESS East has always had a stronger feel to it, and apparently InfoToday will be looking for growth in the government sector.

Ironically, InfoToday recently acquired the Boston Search Engine Meeting from Infonortics, so they'll be running two shows in the Spring (Boston in April and New York in May), leaving leaves the west coast high and dry in terms of search conferences. Maybe the west coast companies are more comfortable in the 'so it yourself' search using Lucene and Solr; or maybe west coast companies just don't want to spend the time schmoozing at shows, when the real work gets done one-on-one.

In any case, look to Washington for KM World November 16-19 2010  at the Renaissance Washington DC Hotel. Should we call it ESS DC?

/s/Miles

SearchDev Dinner in San Jose at ESS West

We've just put the final touches on the annual SearchDev dinner in conjunction with the Enterprise Search Summit West next week in San Jose, California. Anyone who attends the conference, or anyone in the Bay Area, is welcome to attend.

Lucid Imagination is sponsoring the dinner this year along with New Idea Engineering, which will be held on Wednesday night, November 18, at 630 PM in the San Jose Hilton, adjacent to the convention center.

Seats are limited, so if you think you will want to attend, please RSVP today to info(at)ideaeng.com with your name and names of the folks who will join you. Of course, replace the (at) with @...

Miles

Call for Papers: Enterprise Search Summit East, May 2010

My friend Michelle Manafy over at Info Today has asked me to post their call for papers for the May 2010 Enterprise Search Summit East May 11 - 12. ESS East has been one of the premier shows, and Michelle has updated the format to provide attendees more face time with speakers to make the show more valuable.

If you're implementing search now, you're ahead of alot of folks - share what you've learned! Submit a paper today! You've only got until November 30!

See you in New York!

/s/Miles

Bay Area Apache Lucene / Solr Meetup September 3

Another meet-up for San Francisco Bay Lucene and Solr users and developers is coming up Thursday night, September 3rd in Mountain View California.

This time, the Computer History Museum will be the venue at 1401 North Shoreline, the odl Silicon Graphics digs on the corner of 101 and Shoreline. Mark Bennett from New Idea Engineering will be one of many search luminaries on the agenda including Walter Underwood and Brian Pinkerton and others. Topics include relevancy in Solr; search at Netflix and digg, and search performance analysis.

The last meet-up in San Francisco was pretty full.. sign up now or you may find the meet-up has pushed past the quota of 48 people.

/s/Miles

Survey: How companies organize for search

In conjunction with our latest Enterprise Search newsletter, we are running a survey that will be open for the next two months on how companies organize for search. We'd like to hear from you, especially if your company has a formal or informal 'Search Center of Excellence' in plane.

Follow this link to complete the survey, which should take less than 5 minutes to complete. The first 25 people who complete the survey (and who provide contact information so we can follow up) will receive a free Dr Search mug. All survey respondents will receive a link to view the results of the survey via email after the survey closes.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Miles

Lucene/Solr Meet-Up in New York City 7/22

MTV is hosting a New York City Lucene/Solr meet up featuring the guys from Lucid Imagination.
This seems to be similar to the meet-up in San Francisco last month which we've written about in the blog. Unique to the New York event will be a talk by MTV's Michael Rosencrantz will talk about how they are using Solr and the benefits they are seeing.

Visit the meet-up page to learn more and to sign up for the event. If you want to go, register now because the number of available seats is dropping fast.

We've used Solr and Lucene on a number of large projects, and it's certainly become a darned good search engine. In fact, the internal structures of the 1.4 release are almost identical to the internal structure of Verity back in its early days. The catch is that the project technology is really enterprise scale; the packaging still leaves something to be desired to really succeed in the corporate environment. It's getting to be better and better all the time, though, so stay tuned.

We found the event really informative, although the crowd was not a typical corporate IT gathering. If you want to learn about what's new in Solr 1.4, and how a large media company uses open source search to their advantage, head for MTV. You'll also be able to brag about when you "were down at MTV..."

Is everyone running behind?

Charlie Hull of Lemur Consulting Ltd recently suggested on the LinkedIn Enterprise Search Forum that we all post a calendar of upcoming search events, which strikes me as a good idea (you'll need to log in to see the thread). The excellent shows and conferences are few and far between.

I've always thought the best search show is the Enterprise Search Summit - East run every May in New York by Information Today. Historically it's always been a much more useful conference than their ESS-West in San Jose every November, and far more relevant than the KMWorld conferences they co-locate with ESS in both cities. Search Engine Meeting, run by Infonortics in the Spring in Boston, is another good show, although it's much more appropriate for 'search geeks' who are interested in the bleeding edge of research.

It's been a tough year for shows everywhere though, with attendence way off from previous years. Let's hope next year is a better one, that more people can travel to conferences, and that the shows can rebound.

An odd note: I just looked for ESS East 2010 on the web and it's not been announced yet. Usually they have information on the venue and a call for papers (and for sponsor and exhibitors) by now. Maybe they realize that everyone knows it'll be at the Hilton, and the spring-like weather in New York has them all running behind!

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.

Gilbane San Francisco

By Miles Kehoe

It's been a busy month of conferences and travels. This week, home again in time to attend and speak at the Gilbane show at the Westin Hotel in San Francisco.

Billed as "Where Content Management Meets Social Media" this year, the conference seems heavily invested in the popular and trendy topic. Gilbane, when search became hot again, began a 'search practice' headed up by Lynda Moulton, who will apparently not be in attendance this year. In her place, the well known and well-respected Hadley Reynolds, now of IDC, will be running much of the search track. I'm joining Hadley on a panel called "Survival Guide: Delivering Great Results", Thursday morning at 9:40AM.

I'll be at the show most of the day Wednesday and Thursday, so if you're there give me a call...

s/ Miles

Free dinner and free show access in New York

There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but next week, in conjunction with Enterprise Search Summit, there are two bits of new about free offerings:

Attivio is sponsoring this year's SearchDev.org dinner on Monday night, May 11th. RSVP right away to [email protected] before we fill up our limited capacity!

And InfoToday has announced free access to the keynotes and to the exhibits on Tuesday and Wednesday of the show. Details at https://secure.infotoday.com/forms/default.aspx?form=ess2009&priority=ESXTRA2.