Enterprise Search

Lucidworks expands focus in new funding round

Lucidworks, the commercial organization with the largest pool of Solr committers, announced today a new funding round of $50M US from venture firms Top Tier Capital Partners and Silver Lake Waterman, as well as additional participation from existing investors Shasta Ventures, Granite Ventures, and Allegis Capital.

While a big funding round for a privately held company isn't uncommon here in 'the valley', what really caught my attention is where and how Lucidworks will use the new capital. Will Hayes, Lucidworks' CEO, intends to focus the investment on what he calls "smart data experiences" that go beyond simply artificial intelligence and machine learning. The challenge is to provide useful and relevant results by addressing what he calls "the last mile" problem in current AI:  enabling mere mortals to find useful insights in search without having to understand the black art of data science and big data analysis. The end target is to drive better customer experiences and improved employee productivity.

A number of well-known companies utilize Lucidworks Fusion already, many along with AI and ML tools and technologies. I've long thought that to take advantage of 'big data' like Google,  Amazon, and others do, you needed huge numbers of users and queries to confidently provide meaningful suggestions in search results.  While that helps, Hayes explained that smaller organizations will be able to benefit from the technology in Fusion because of both smaller and more focused data sets, even with a smaller pool of queries. With the combination of these two characteristics, Lucidworks expects to deliver many of the benefits of traditional machine learning and AI-like results to enterprise-sized content. It will be interesting to see what Lucidworks does in the next several releases of Fusion!

Poor data quality gives search a bad rap

If you’re involved in managing the enterprise search instance at your company, there’s a good chance that you’ve experienced at least some users complain about the poor results they see. 

The common lament search teams hear is “Why didn’t we use Google?” when in fact, sites that implemented the GSA but don’t utilize the Google logo and look, we’ve seen the same complaints.

We're often asked to come in and recommend a solution. Sometimes the problem is simply using the wrong search platform: not every platform handles every user case and requirement equally well. Occasionally, the problem is a poorly or misconfigured search, or simply an instance that hasn’t been managed properly. Even the renowned Google public search engine doesn’t happen by itself, but even that is a poor example: in recent years, the Google search has become less of a search platform and more of a big data analytics engine.

Over the years, we’ve been helping clients select, implement, and manage Intranet search. In my opinion, the problem with search is elsewhere: Poor data quality. 

Enterprise data isn’t created with search in mind. There is little incentive for content authors to attach quality metadata in the properties fields of Adobe PDF Maker, Microsoft Office, and other document publishing tools. To make matters worse, there may be several versions of a given document as it goes through creation, editing, reviews, and updates. And often the early drafts, as well as the final version, are in the same directory or file share. Very rarely does a public facing web site content have such issues.

Sometimes content management systems make it easy to implement what is really ‘search engine optimization’ or SEO; but it seems all too often that the optimization is left to the enterprise search platform to work out.

We have an updated two-part series on data quality and search, starting here. We hope you find it helpful; let us know if you have any questions!

First Impressions on the new Forrester Wave

The new Forrester Wave™: Cognitive Search And Knowledge Discovery Solutions is out, and once again I think Forrester, along with Gartner and others, miss the mark on the real enterprise search market. 

In the belief that sharing my quick first impression will at least start a conversation going until I can write up a more complete analysis, I am going to share these first thoughts.

First, I am not wild about the new buzzterms 'cognitive search' and "insight engines". Yes, enterprise search can be intelligent, but it's not cognitive. which Webster defines as "of, relating to, or involving conscious mental activities (such as thinking, understanding, learning, and remembering)". HAL 9000 was cognitive software; "Did you mean" and "You might also like" are not cognition.  And enterprise search has always provided insights into content, so why the new 'insight engines'? 

Moving on, I agree with Forrester that Attivio, Coveo and Sinequa are among the leaders. Honestly, I wish Coveo was fully multi-platform, but they do have an outstanding cloud offering that in my mind addresses much of the issue.

However, unlike Forrester, I believe Lucidworks Fusion belongs right up there with the leaders. Fusion starts with a strong open source Solr-based core; an integrated administrative UI; a great search UI builder (with the recent acquisition of Twigkit); and multiple-platform support. (Yep, I worked there a few years ago, but well before the current product was created).

I count IDOL in with the 'Old Guard' along with Endeca, Vivisimo (‘Watson’) and perhaps others - former leaders still available, but offered by non-search companies, or removed from traditional enterprise search (Watson). And it will be interesting to see if Idol and its new parent, Microfocus, survive the recent shotgun wedding. 

Tier 2, great search but not quite “full” enterprise search, includes Elastic (which I believe is in the enviable position as *the* platform for IoT), Mark Logic, and perhaps one or two more.

And there are several newer or perhaps less-well known search offerings like Algolia, Funnelback, Swiftype, Yippy and more. Don’t hold their size and/or youth against them; they’re quite good products.

No, I’d say the Forrester report is limited, and honestly a bit out of touch with the real enterprise search market. I know, I know; How do I really feel? Stay tuned, I've got more to say coming soon. What do you think? Leave a comment below!

What features do your search users really want?

What features and capabilities do corporate end-users need from their search platform? Here's a radical concept: ask stakeholders what they want- and what they need - and making a list. No surprise: you'll have too much to do.

Try this: meet with stakeholders from each functional area of the organization. During each interview, ask people to tell you what internet search sites they use for personal browsing, and what capabilities of those sites they like best. As they name the desired features, write them on a white board.

Repeat this with representatives from every department, whether marketing, IT, support, documentation, sales, finance, shipping or others - really every group that will use the platform for a substantial part of their days. 

Once you have the list, ask for a little more help. Tell your users they each have $100 "Dev Dollars" to invest in new features, and ask them to spend whatever portion they want to pay for each feature - but all they have is $100 DD.

Now the dynamics get interesting. The really important features get the big bucks; the outliers get a pittance -  if anything. Typically, the top two or three features requested get between 40DD and 50DD; and that quickly trails off. 

I know - it sounds odd. These Dev Dollars have no true value - but people give a great deal of thought to assigning relative value to a list of capabilities - and it gives you a feature list with real priorities.

How do you discover what users really want? 

 

 

The Findwise Enterprise Search and Findability Survey 2016 is open for business

Would you find it helpful to benchmark your Enterprise Search operations against hundreds of corporations, organizations and government agencies worldwide? Before you answer, would you find that information useful enough that you’re spend a few minutes answering a survey about your enterprise search practices? It seems like a pretty good deal to me to have real-world data from people just like yourself worldwide.

This survey, the results of which are useful, insightful, and actionable for search managers everywhere, provides the insight into many of the critical areas of search.

Findwise, the Swedish company with offices there and in Denmark, Norway Poland, Norway and London, is gathering data now for the 2016 version of their annual Enterprise Search and Findability Survey at http://bit.ly/1sY9qiE.

What sorts of things will you learn?

Past surveys give insight into the difference between companies will happy search users versus those whose employees prefer to avoid using internal search. One particularly interesting finding last year was that there are three levels of ‘search maturity’, identifiable by how search is implemented across content.

The least mature search organizations, roughly 25% of respondents, have search for specific repositories (siloes), but they generally treat search as ‘fire and forget’, and once installed, there is no ongoing oversight.

More mature search organizations that represent about 60% of respondents, have one search for all silos; but maintaining and improving search technology has very little staff attention.

The remaining 15% of organizations answering the survey invest in search technology and staff, and continuously attempt to improve search and findability. These organizations often have multiple search instances tailored for specific users and repositories.

One of my favorite findings a few years back was that a majority of enterprises have “one or less” full time staff responsible for search; and yet a similar majority of employees reported that search just didn’t work. The good news? Subsequent surveys have shown that staffing search with as few as 2 FTEs improves overall search satisfactions; and 3 FTEs seem to strongly improve overall satisfaction. And even more good news: Over the years, the trend in enterprise search shows that more and more organizations are taking search and findability seriously.

You can participate in the 2016 Findwise Enterprise Search and Findability Survey in just 10 or 15 minutes and you’ll be among the first to know what this year brings. Again, you’ll find the 2016 survey at http://bit.ly/1sY9qiE.