Needed – A Dramatic Redefinition of “Search”.
The enterprise search market has become a crowded and complex space
dominated by a few big players where the goal is to find old documents
and static web pages. The utter futility of returning 670,000 results
to a person who really only cares about the first 10 has never really
been addressed. For a fairly long period of time, I have felt that
technical innovation in search technology had stalled. This is not a
new topic among bloggers.
For me at least, the last really interesting bit of search
technology was adding a geographic component to the search that let you
center the results around a particular point – say an address. This was
really cool 4 years ago, but disappeared into the ether with the
bursting of the bubble.
The major search engines simply return obvious results. Yes, its
across billions of pages and I can appreciate the heavy lifting that
goes on, but more and more I am looking for synthesis – an opinion on a
topic that matters because I can use it to make a decision. Often times
I am looking for conversations between knowledgeable individuals that
can improve my understanding of a particular topic. Technorati is
helping in some ways, but there is more.
The real productivity improvements (making an informed decision
faster) will occur when we see enterprise search technology bring you
the context of a conversation. This requires natural language
processing, dynamic taxonomies, auto-categorization, and expert
location through knowledge of the social network. Trap this in a
collaboration environment and you will really have something exciting. [Scott Young's Radio Weblog]