Tag Archives: contextual search

KMWorld 2010 Reflections: Search is a Journey Not a Destination

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Two weeks ago me, Ludvig Johansson and Christopher Wallström attended KMWorlds quadruple conference in Washington D.C. The conference consisted of four different conferences; KMWorld, Enterprise Search Summit, Taxonomy Bootcamp and SharePoint Symposium. I focused on Enterprise Search Summit and SharePoint Symposium and Christopher mainly covered Taxonomy Bootcamp as well as the Enterprise Search Summit. (Christopher will soon write a blog post about this as well.)

During the conferences there where some good quality content, however most of it was old news with speakers mainly focusing on outputs of their own products. This was disappointing since I had hoped to see the newest and coolest solutions within my area. Speakers presented systems from their corporations, where the newest and coolest functionality they described was shallow filters on a Google Search Appliance. From my perspective this is not new or cool. I would rather consider this standard functionality in today’s search solutions.

However, some sessions where really good. Daniel W. Rasmus talked about the Evolution of Search in quite a fun and thoughtful way. One thing he wanted to see in the near future was more personalization of search. Search needs to know the user and adapt to him/her and not simply use a standardized algorithm. As Rasmus sad it: “my search engine is not that in to me”. This is, as I would put it, spot on how we see it at Findwise. Today’s customer wants standard search with components that have existed for years now. It’s time for search to take the next step in the evolution and for us to start deliver Findabillity solutions adapted to your needs as an individual. In the line of this, Rasmus ended with another good quote: “Don’t let your search vendors set your exceptions to low”. I think this speaks for it self more or less. If we want contextual search then we should push the vendors out there to start deliver!

Another good session was delivered by Ellen Feaheny on how to utilize both old and new systems smarter. It was from this session the title of this post origins, “It’s a journey not a destination”. I thought this sums up what we feel everyday in our projects. It’s common that customers want to see projects to have a clear start and end. However with search and Findability we see it as a journey. I can even go as far to say it’s a journey without an end. We have customers coming and complaining about their search; saying “It doesn’t work anymore” or “The content is old”, to give two examples. The problem is that search is not a one time problem that you solve and then never have to think about again. If you don’t work with your search solution and treat search as a journey, continually improve relevance, content and invest time in search analytics your solution will soon get dusty and not deliver what your employees or customers wants.

Search is a journey not a destination.

Search in SharePoint 2010

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This week there has been a lot of buzz about Microsoft’s launch of SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010. Since SharePoint 2007 has been the quickest growing server product in the history of Microsoft, the expectations on SharePoint 2010 are tremendous. And also great expectations for search in Sharepoint 2010

Apart from a great deal of possibilities when it comes to content creation, collaboration and networking, easy business intelligence etc. the launch also holds another promise: that of even better capabilities for search in Sharepoint 2010 (with the integration of FAST).

Since Microsoft acquired FAST in 2008, there have been a lot of speculations about what the future SharePoint versions may include in terms of search. And since Microsoft announced that they will drop their Linux and UNIX versions in order to focus on higher innovation speed, Microsoft customer are expecting something more than the regular. In an early phase it was also clear that Microsoft is eager to take market shares from the growing market in internet business.

So, simply put, the solutions that Microsoft now provide in terms of search is solutions for Business productivity (where the truly sophisticated search capabilities are available if you have Enterprise CAL-licenses, i.e. you pay for the number of users you have) and Internet Sites (where the pricing is based on the number of servers). These can then be used in a number of scenarios, all dependent on the business and end-user needs.
Microsoft has chosen to describe it like this:

  • “Foundation” is, briefly put, basic SharePoint search (Site Search).
  • “Standard” adds collaboration features to the “Foundation” edition and allows it to tie into repositories outside of SharePoint.
  • “Enterprise ” adds a number of capabilities, previously only available through FAST licenses, such as contextual search (recognition of departments, names, geographies etc), ability to tag meta data to unstructured content, more scalability etc.

I’m not going to go into detail, rather just conclude that the more Microsoft technology the company or organization already use, the more benefits it will gain from investing in SharePoint search capabilities.

And just to be clear:  non-SharePoint versions (stand-alone) of FAST are still available, even though they are not promoted as intense as the SharePoint ones.

Apart from Microsoft’s overview above, Microsoft Technet provides a more deepdrawing description of the features and functionality from both an end-user and administrator point of view.

We look forward describing the features and functions in more detail in our upcoming customer cases. If you have any questions to our SharePoint or FAST search specialist, don’t hesitate to post them here on the blog. We’ll make sure you get all the answers.

Lifestreams and Google

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Google recently announced their new experimental site and it holds a feature to see search results grouped on dates, visualized in a time line, based on extracted dates from the source documents.

Simple entity extraction isn’t that complicated, especially not when it comes to keeping track of dates – some regular expressions can easy detect date formats and normalize them for any search engine to keep track. However, other vendors have at the most visualized them as dynamic navigators or just used it as metadata . The key lies in visualizing it and providing a user friendly interface, which I must say Google, again, has succeeded with. This announcement made me think of something two researchers from Yale wrote an article about in 1996.

Freeman and Gelmter (1996) introduce a new metaphor, “Lifestreams” – an idea for users to organize their own personal workspace. The concept is that everything a person creates or are involved with are attached to a lifestream, which simply is a visualized time line linked to a storage repository. Later the user can add filtering and alerting functions to monitor and summarize their the streams for easier overview or just narrow their streams down to suit their current information need.

For example, if a user wishes to add a meeting, there is no need to open up the calendar, just attach the meeting entry to the life stream in the future. Adding the proper alerting, one will still be reminded. Lifestreams are not only historical, the concept also expands into the future. Furthermore, the concept grows to having various substreams, one for your private, one for your professional, dynamically as you create it.

Furthermore Google also announced their new map search, where one could search for a almost anything and get a rough overview (of course on a map) where places related to the query is displayed highlighted on the map. It’s noticeable that Google hasn’t utilized all their content in these two experimental features, but I must say I’m really looking forward when they do. I would say that Google now are really starting showing off that they definitely are capable to deal with true contextual search.

So, what about the lifestreams? Well, the recent buzz around Enterprise 2.0 and moving the Web 2.0 with social networking and blogging inside the corporate firewalls could really learn from these three concepts. If some vendor would provide functionality for ordinary businessmen to build personal lifestreams, hook their documents, meetings and resources to it combined with easy controlled vocabulary tagging and visually on a map attaching it to location. Let’s add the last magic spice: search to aid building up enterprise historical lifestreams and provide easy access, entity extraction, filtering and alerting one would have the silver bullet. One could follow the lifestream of an organization as one follow the heartbeat of a human being. Enterprise Lifestreams of aggregated deparment lifestreams of aggregated individual lifestreams. Imagine visualizing an organizational lifestream and tap into the pulse of an enterprise organization. Imagine to share professional lifestreams with collegues and interestgroups.

Not to take over John Lennon’s role about imagine, but I feel this could the next killer enterprise application that would glue all enterprise 2.0 concepts together. This could be the next step in social networking and truly support processoriented organizations’s everyday work! What do you think? Are our enterprises ready for something like this?