Enterprise Search

Are you spending too much on enterprise search?

If your organization uses enterprise search, or if you are in the market for a new search platform, you may want to attend our webinar next week "Are you spending too much for search?". The one hour session will address:

• What do users expect?
• Why not just use Google?
• How much search do you need?
• Is an RFI a waste of time?   

Date: Wednesday, November 16 2011

Time: 11AM Pacific Standard Time / 1900 UTC

Register today!

Enterprise Search Summit 2010 - DC

Even as we prepare for ESS East in New York (ESS NY from now on?), Information Today has issued its call for papers for the first ever ESS-DC to be held in Washington DC November 16-18 2010.

Follow this link to find background on what InfoToday is looking for; or jump right to the submissions page. Don't be shy: everyone who presents papers had, at one time, never done it before. What you know, someone else needs to know!

In our experience, the kind of content InfoToday likes is the information that can help an organization select or manage search and related technologies. Generally, real-world stories about how other companies and organizations have succeeded with search are the ones that attendees appreciate the most. 

We'll also be having a searchdev dinner at ESS DC this year. Details to come late in summer, but plan for it now!

Are you doing search now? Have you been successful getting it going on time and under budget? Tell your story. Submit your idea now!

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

New SearchDev groups for Autonomy and FAST

Years ago, Verity had a very popular and successful user group meeting every year, but Autonomy has not seemed to be interested in continuing the event.  SearchDev grew out of that last Verity user group meeting, and has a very active membership looking for, and providing advice to, those developing search applications within their respective companies.

As the group has grown, we're seeing an interest in more specialization by search technology. For that reason, we're happy to announce creation of two new SearchDev groups: autonomy.searchdev.org and fast.searchdev.org. These, along with the original www.searchdev.org, will continue to provide technical assistance for search developers, and should allow us to drill down a bit in terms of specialization. Expect other groups in the near future for commercial and open source engines.

Since these communities will have a more narrow focus, the feeling is that the group can grow to include webinars and perhaps even regional user group meetings in the future.

People who are interested in participating can join the Yahoo-group-based forum and start working to make these new user group a success.

s/Miles

Impressions of first Lucene/Solr SF Meetup

Kudos to Carl, our NIE Marketeer and defacto social director, for getting us to attend, well worth it, and conveniently coinciding with Gilbane.

The Good:

• VERY entertaining, very informative.  Lots of good info about upcoming versions of Lucene and Solr, including additional performance tweaks.
• A friendly, supportive bunch of like-minded nerds, and I mean this is the best possible way.
• Also discussions of other related Apache projects.  We're all gonna need a cheat sheet pretty soon to keep track of it all.
• Lucene/Solr will soon have implemented much of the core features of Autonomy IDOL, Endeca, FAST, etc.  They really ought to be spying.  :-)

Personally I think Otis & co. might wanna fly out for the next one.  I also think Dieselpoint ought to attend and talk about Open Pipeline.  If we get up enough energy maybe we could even volunteer to do that next time, we're on the board after all, but this is really Chris's baby.

The Not-so-Good:

• About 50 terms that clients would not understand.  Don't get me wrong, we love the Map/Reduce, Bayesian, K-Means, SVD stuff, but most corporate clients would be lost.
• Not much for Enterprise Packaging.  Ironically it's the mundane aspects of search, from a non-developer standpoint, that are still not on the horizon.  Not a criticism of the developers, they have what they need.
• Not much about Nutch.  Nutch 1.0 is out, along with rumors of a revised admin GUI, but not much coverage here.

Impressions of Lucid Imagination:

This event was sponsored by Lucid, a company that recently got funding for bringing commercial packaging and services to the open source search world, and their senior staff includes quite a few of the core committers.

• A very sincere bunch of guys.
• They haven't sold their souls to corporate America, I think their "geek cred" is still well in tact.
• Probably will not be filling in enterprise packaging pot holes any time soon.
• Do they understand the Enterprise Market?

Also a shout out to LinkedIn and IBM for giving back to open source community.

There was also an "open mic" segment, and I'd like to give a shout to Avi Rappaport - I agree 1,000%, "stop words bad!" (or at least the blind use of index time stop words)

Surprises:

• Not much of a threat to Google Appliance, due to packaging.  Yes, Google scales with their Map/Reduce and relevancy algorithms, and the open source guys have responded, but that's not the stuff that makes Google tick these days.
• And despite the impressive and rapidly evolving core technologies, also not a real threat to the other Tier One vendors like FAST and Autonomy.  More on this seeming contradiction in a bit.
• The Tier 2 vendors of the world, Attivio, Exalead, Dieselpoint, etc. DO need to pay attention.  There is a place for Tier 2 vendors, but they need to mind what the open source products do and do not provide more carefully.
• It's really cool to see IBM willing to contribute so aggressively to the open source search engines, even though they sell several of their own.  A naive person might think they are competing with themselves, sabotaging their own sales guys, but they're a lot smarter than that.  They are selling their commercial search products as pure search, those technologies are always part of a larger (and more expensive) grand business solution.  They know what they're doing!

For similar reasons, still not a huge threat to Autonomy, MS/FAST, Endeca, etc. on corporate services.  I said earlier that the Apache projects are implementing a lot of the "secret sauce" that launched Autonomy and Endeca, etc, so you'd think this represents "a clear and present danger", but Mike Lynch's secret algorithms are not why people buy IDOL anymore.  Things like giant reference accounts, professional services, and commercial grade spiders have a lot more to with why big companies still pay six figures for search technology.

And speaking of surprises and Lucid Imagination, I wanna circle back to their PR a few months back when they got their funding and launched their company.  They talked about relevancy in their press releases!?  Wow... Yes, Lucene and Solr have some good traction there, but that specific competitive advantage has been used by almost every commercial search vendor in the past 15 years, including Verity, Autonomy and Google!

I would've expected them to say something like "we're gonna do for Lucene what RedHat did for Linux" - this would have been a very clear business-oriented proposition, though to be fair lots of companies have used that business model as well.  It wouldn't be original, but would be more business centric.  Then again, I'm not in Marketing, and their VC's obviously liked their pitch, so what do I know!

s/Mark

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.

Attivio sponsoring SearchDev dinner at ESS NY

The Enterprise Search Summit in New York, one of the best of the enterprise search trade shows, is just three weeks away. We're happy to announce that Attivio is sponsoring the SearchDev.org dinner on Monday evening, May 11th.

As it was last year, the dinner will be at the Bice Restaurant at 7 E 54th Street, just a block from the Hilton. If you're involved in creating an enterprise search solution at your company and you plan on attending the show - or if you're just in town - feel free to attend. RSVP to [email protected] to confirm your spot.

Attivio, which Gartner Group has called one of the 'cool vendors' in BI and performance management, has designed its search technology with a small footprint, incremental scalability, and real power to combine searches across structured and unstructured documents.

SearchDev.org is a technical and business discussion forum for people evaluating, selecting, and implementing enterprise search applications. It is managed by New Idea Engineering.

To attend the dinner, contact [email protected].