Rebecca Hawkes posted a link to Stephen E. Arnold's summery of "Enterprise Search: 14 Industry Experts Predict the Future of Search" by Cóbhan Phillipson
A few of the quotes
"Effective enterprise search represents one of the most challenging areas in business today"
"In my opinion the enterprise search market today has little appetite for more sophisticated products the likes of which we have seen come and go in recent years."
"Why should you have to ask first?: Search has been traditionally driven by the searcher (duh), but interesting projects that allow for integrated understanding of where/what the user is doing allows for proactive intervention."
"Buzzwords like “federated search” and “enterprise search” place too much focus on “search”, and not enough on getting the right information, transparently and rapidly to the consumer."
"Search will continue to become more implicit, connecting users to knowledge transparently. Users do not want to “search”, they want to get information. We are trying to collapse the “time to information”, and this is not just about extremely fast search of vast amounts of data. It is also about not wasting time searching and presenting irrelevant information, and about creating results that are fine-grained. People are accustomed to doing a search and getting say 10 best results, each one a document, and then sifting through the documents. We are trying to improve that by returning finer grained results that are not documents, but the exact sentence, the exact spreadsheet cell, or exact information the user is looking for."
"The global enterprise search market reaped revenues of more than $1.47 billion in 2012. That figure is forecast to be $4.68 billion by 2019."
"In the future enterprise search will become more personal. With users being able to add and delete their own search sources. True federation will come in to play, and the ‘super index’ will start to take a back seat to ‘Click-Time’ information access. This change will mean that users gain power to control their own results, Bringing in cloud stores, internal applications, such as CRM and Doc management, as well as pulling in external non-corporate content from web sites, such as Linked-In, Facebook and other social networks. This will then give the user a 100% view of their data and information points."
Stephen Arnold's summary:
Several observations occurred to me as I worked through the compilation of expert opinions in “Enterprise Search: 14 Industry Experts Predict the Future of Search”.
First, the confusion about what enterprise search is characterizes the experts’ approach to findability. A knowledge management professional would set about gathering other writings by these individuals and attempting to provide a context for their “information” and opinions. Without a knowledge framework, the collection of opinions is confusing.
Second, the selection of companies represented provides a wide spectrum of starting points. The inclusion of search engine optimization experts mixed with vendors of primary systems and component vendors provides a surprising consensus. Automation is likely to be more important with each passing day. Also, users want to be relieved of the burden of formulating a query or will be given systems that reduce the user’s dependence on keywords and formal queries. The approach is likely to be given considerable attention because automation reduces some of the costs associated with finding information. Will automated search provide knowledge management systems with appropriate inputs? If not, perhaps the discontinuity between enterprise search and knowledge management becomes another challenge for both disciplines to resolve.
Third, the vendors, with the sole exception of LTU in Paris, focus on text. The data about the volume of content by file type is not definitive. The need to be able to search audio, images and video within an organization is increasing. Videos posted on YouTube, Vimeo or other file sharing systems are proliferating. IBM creates big data podcasts each week, distributing them via Apple iTunes. Videos about search, content processing and analytics systems are key parts of the marketing efforts of Attensity, MarkLogic, Oracle and other firms. The future of enterprise search is more than text. The Docurated analysis makes clear that enterprise search vendors and experts may be their own worst enemy.
There may be some challenges for enterprise search in the organizations of tomorrow. Without innovation, enterprise search is likely to find itself marginalized as enterprise knowledge management solutions proliferate. Search without search may be shorthand for who needs old-fashioned search?
