Simon Barratt

Enterprise Search "I Know It Was Here Somewhere"

Internet Search amount to 90%+ of how people locate web sites,  Less and less people type the actual URL in the address line for the browser anymore.

Internet Search does no equal Intranet Search

Intranet (ra = restricted access)

Index should be built from the raw data, PageRank means nothing in Intrantet (there has to be something else)

Extra information is available on the Intranet: ID of person searching, where they work, Job title etc.

Vendors on the panel: IBM, FAST, ENDECA,

IBM
Two demos from IBM: Semantic search (concepts v keywords) Social Search

Searching for "phone numbers" will actually highlight phone numbers, email addresses rather than words "phone numbers".  Semanti search interprumpts the context of the search to provide more meaningful results.

Social search features will also identify bookmarks saved by employees and present them in the result set too.

FAST
Seems to be a tool that allows user to construct their own custom search results portal.  Searchs are defined and optionally saved to be shared.  email notifications can be sent to you when ever new results fall into the search results.  Desktop client provide similar functions on your local stored data.  Looked complex!

ENDECA
Search is about the joy of finding, not searching.  Assume everything is miscellaneous, ans has whatever characteristics it has - now deal with it!  They use Facets to build a "guided navigation" concept.  The results are returned, but with intelligent grouping, based on the "meta data" of the result set.  Provides a sort dynamic Yahoo type taxonomy navigation, but the taxonomy is dynamic based on the results returned.



Does Search replace Portals?  Is Search the replacement to the command line?  Generally corporate search sucks, compared to what people can achieve on the Internet.

An ok session, but make no mistake, the quality of Enterprise search has to improve.