Enterprise Search Blog

It takes patience, knowledge and analysis to tell when search is really working. For the past few years I have seen a trend away from doing any "dog work" to get search solutions tweaked and tuned to ensure compliance with genuine business needs. People get cut, budgets get sliced and projects dumped because (fill the excuse) and the message gets promoted "enterprise search doesn't work." Here's the secret, when enterprise search doesn't work the chances are it's because people aren't working on what needs to be done. Everyone is looking for a quick fix, short cut, "no thinking required" solution.

This plays out in countless variations but the bottom line is that impatience with human processing time and the assumption that a search engine "ought to be able to" solve this problem without human intervention cripple possibilities for success faster than anything else.

It is time for search implementation teams to get realistic about the tasks that must be executed and milestones to be reached. Teams must know how they are going to measure success and reliability, then to stick with it, demanding that everyone agrees on the requirements before throwing the towel in at the first executive anecdote that the "dang thing doesn't work."

There are a lot of steps to getting even an out-of-the-box solution working well. But none is more important than paying attention to these:
• Know your content
• Know your search audience
• Know what needs to be found and how it will be looked for
• Know what is not being found that should be

The operative verb here is to know and to really know anything takes work, brain work, iterative, analytical and thoughtful work. When I see these reactions from IT upon setting off a search query that returns any results: "we're done" OR "no error messages, good" OR "all these returns satisfy the query," my reaction is:

• How do you know the search engine was really looking in all the places it should?
• What would your search audience be likely to look for and how would they look?
• Who is checking to make sure these questions are being answered correctly?
• How do you know if the results are complete and comprehensive?

It is the last question that takes digging and perseverance. It is pretty simple to look at search results and see content that should not have been retrieved and figure out why it was. Then you can tune to make sure it does not happen again.

To make sure you didn't miss something takes systematic "dog work" and you have to know the content. This means starting with a small body of content that it is possible for you to know, thoroughly. Begin with content representative of what your most valued search audience would want to find. Presumably, you have identified these people through establishing a clear business case for enterprise search. (This is not something for the IT department to do but for the business team that is vested in having search work for their goals.) Get these "alpha worker" searchers to show you how they would go about trying to find the stuff they need to get their work done every day, to share with you some of what they consider some of the most valuable documents they have worked with over the past few years. (Yes, years - you need to work with veterans of the organization whose value is well established, as well as with legacy content that is still valuable.)

Confirm that these seminal documents are in the path of the search engine for the index build; see what is retrieved when they are searched for by the seekers. Keep verifying by looking at both content and results to be sure that nothing is coming back that shouldn't and that nothing is being missed. Then double the content with documents on similar topics that were not given to you by the searchers, even material that they likely would never have seen that might be formatted very differently, written by different authors, and more variable in type and size but still relevant. Re-run the exact searches that were done originally and see what is retrieved. Repeat in scaling increments and validate at every point. When you reach points where content is missing from results that should have been found using the searcher's method, analyze, adjust, and repeat.

A recent project revealed to me how willing testers are to accept mediocre results when it became apparent how closely content must be scrutinized and peeled back to determine its relevance. They had no time for that and did not care how bad the results were because they had a pre-defined deadline. Adjustments may call for refinements in the query formulation that might require an API to make it more explicit, or the addition of better category metadata with rich cross-references to cover vocabulary variations. Too often this type of implementation discovery signals a reason to shut down the project because all options require human resources and more time. Before you begin, know that this level of scrutiny will be necessary to deliver good-to-great results; set that expectation for your team and management, so it will be acceptable to them when adjustments are needed for more work to be done to get it right. Just don't blame it on the search engine - get to work, analyze and fix the problem. Only then can you let search loose on your top target audience.

When thinking about some enterprise search use cases that require planning and implementation, presentation of search results is not often high on the list of design considerations. Learning about a new layer of software called Documill from CEO and founder, Mika Könnölä, caused me to reflect on possible applications in which his software would be a benefit.

There is one aspect of search output (results) that always makes an impression when I search. Sometimes the display is clear and obvious and other times the first thing that pops into my mind is "what the heck am I looking at" or "why did this stuff appear?" In most cases, no matter how relevant the content may end up being to my query, I usually have to plow through a lot (could be dozens) of content pieces to confirm the validity or usefulness of what is retrieved.

Admittedly, much of my searching is research or helping with a client's intranet implementation, not just looking for a quick answer, a fact or specific document. When I am in the mode for what I call "quick and dirty" search, I can almost always frame the search statement to get the exact result I want very quickly. But when I am trying to learn about a topic new to me, broaden my understanding or collect an exhaustive corpus of material for research, sifting and validating dozens of documents by opening each and then searching within the text for the piece of the content that satisfied the query is both tedious and annoyingly slow.

That is where Documill could enrich my experience considerably for it can be layered on any number of enterprise search engines to present results in the form of precise thumbnails that show where in a document the query criterion/criteria is located. In their own words, "it enhances traditional search engine result list with graphically accurate presentation of the content."

Here are some ideas for its application:

• In an application developed to find specific documents from among thousands that are very similar (e.g. invoices, engineering specifications), wouldn't it be great to see only a dozen, already opened, pages to the correct location where the data matches the query?
• In an application of 10s of thousands of legacy documents, OCRed for metadata extraction displayable as PDFs, wouldn't it be great to have the exact pages of the document that match the search displayed as visual images opened to read in the results page? This is especially important in technical documents of 60-100 pages where the target content might be on page 30 or 50.
• In federated search output, when results may contain many similar documents, the immediate display of just the right pages as images ready for review will be a time-saving blessing.
• In a situation where a large corpus of content contains photographs or graphics, such as newspaper archives, scientific and engineering drawings, an instantaneous visual of the content will sharpen access to just the right documents.

I highly recommend that you ask your search engine solution provider about incorporating Documill into your enterprise search architecture. And, if you have, please share your experiences with me through comments to this post or by reaching out for a conversation.

Earlier comments in this blog referred to Autonomy ads in Information Week. They have continued throughout early 2009 with just the latest proclaiming "Autonomy Dominates Enterprise Search" in bold red and black, two of my favorite, eye-catching colors. Having read the publication for over ten years, I notice things that are different. Seeing a search company repeatedly showing up keeps me noticing because they are the first to spend on major advertising like this in an IT publication.

This week the predictable happened, it was an article by Information Week's Sr. VP focusing on Autonomy's terrific business run in a tough economy. Fair enough - it happens all the time for big spenders.

I just want to remind readers that if you are a small unit in a large organization or a small or medium business, there are dozens of enterprise search solutions that will serve you extremely well, with much lower cost of ownership and startup effort than Autonomy. You do not need the biggest or fastest growing company's products to get good or even excellent solutions. Furthermore, the chances of getting superior customer support and services from a more modest company, which is focused exclusively on search excellence, are much better.

Be sure to check out the offerings at the Gilbane Conference in San Francisco next week. A lot more guidance and good case studies will give you an earful of what else to consider. The search headliners at the conference with Hadley Reynolds moderating are:

E8. Search Survival Guide: Delivering Great Results
Speakers: Randy Woods, Co-founder & Executive VP, non-linear creations, Best Practices for Tuning Enterprise Search and Miles Kehoe, President, New Idea Engineering

E9/I5. The Next Big Thing: Tomorrow's Search Revealed
Speakers: Stephen Arnold, ArnoldIT, What You Need to Know About Google Dataspaces and Jeff Fried, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft

E10/I6. Bringing it All Together: Perils and Pitfalls of Search Federation
Speakers: Helen Mitchell Curtis, Senior Program Director of Enterprise Solutions, MacFadden, Federated Search in a Disparate Environment, Larry Donahue, Chief Operating Officer & Corporate Counsel, Deep Web Technologies, Federated Search: True Enterprise Search and Jeff Fried, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft

E11/I7. The Special Case of Categories - and Where To Find Them
Speakers: Joseph Busch, Founder, Taxonomy Strategies, Taxonomy Validation, and Arje Cahn, CTO, Hippo, Find What You Need in Unstructured Content with the Help of Others (and your CMS): Demo of Wikipedia with Faceted Search

E12/I8. It's Easier with Structure: Leveraging Markup for Better Search
Speakers: Dianne Burley, Industry Specialist, Nstein Technologies, Semantic Search and J. Brooke Aker, CEO, Expert System, A 3-Step Walk Through ECM Using Semantics

E13/I9. Improving SharePoint Search & Navigation with a Taxonomy and Metadata

Here is a monthly summary of some interesting and important announcements for April, but first a couple of comments on the Infonortics Search Engines conference in Boston the last week of April. Ever searching for ways to embrace and make social tools more useful, I decided to tweet the entire Infonortics meeting. Except for a lapse late on Monday because I left a little early and some wireless issues Tuesday PM, I was able to pass on quite a few interesting or relevant comments by speakers. See what you get out of some very terse tweets by searching in Twitter infonorticssearchengine (that takes up entirely too much space I learned). The talks were excellent and many of the speakers emphasized how hard it is to do search well; it was also clear that there are many, many ways to try to do it well, none of them for the faint of heart. If you want to get under the search hood, this is the conference for technologists and those who want to hear what the development community is pondering.

Here is the April news:

Marketwire. Bell Mobility and Coveo Partner to create Enterprise Search from Bell, an Exclusive Enterprise-Grade Mobile Search Solution, March 31, 2009.

My diminished manual dexterity and old eyes have discouraged me from embracing smart mobile devices but this announcement demonstrates that Coveo does understand the future of search. Coveo is releasing many enhanced functions and new options but the emphasis on search on a handheld is compelling for all road warriors. From what I understand, setup is pretty quick and productivity is immediate. This is a smart move to support Coveo's current customer base and a draw for new ones.

Velten, Carlo. Official Qitera Blog: Qitera Enterprise - Search as a Service, April 2, 2009

There is a 15-day free trial being offered for this new software as a service for aggregating and sharing Internet search results with colleagues within the enterprise. As a consultant in knowledge management, helping people with collaboration and sharing technologies for KM processes, I find this an intriguing option. If any readers have checked it out, please let us know your impressions. http://www.qitera.com/corp/products/overview

Knovel Enhances Engineering Reference Offering, Adding Works from Five New Publishers, 04/06/2009

As a former technical librarian in a Fortune 500 chemical company, I contributed to a massive manually built index to technical information to support our research scientists. We ensured that all property data for any materials we developed, or developed by our competitors was indexed for rapid retrieval (e.g. what is the thermal conductivity of ABC grade of graphite). The overhead for scanning journals, government documents, patents and conference papers to harvest and categorize that information was enormous. Since I learned about Knovel in 2002, I have been a huge fan of the value of the content they codify and make accessible through their proprietary retrieval tools. This content is re-purposed through licenses with publishers who understand the increased value of being able to manipulate tables, charts and graphs as well has being able to compare data from various sources of reference books. Engineers and scientists need to be able to find data expressed in the most relevant form for their purpose. Knovel provides an aggregating and retrieval engine, and researchers can then normalize search results dynamically themselves through simple re-sorting operations. If you want to be kept abreast of the wealth of content that continues to come on-line from Knovel, be sure to visit their site and sign up for announcements. I recommend a subscription to their services to every scientific and engineering library in my client organizations.

April 16, 2009. Endeca's Digital Asset Navigator offers an unprecedented access and discovery experience, combining Endeca's market leading search, Guided Navigation and Content Spotlighting capabilities. It integrates related data from Open Text's enterprise Digital Asset Management solution, as well as databases, file servers, enterprise applications and other source systems... The joint solution also takes advantage of Endeca's advanced security capabilities to ensure that users only have access to data they are approved to see and use...

This is an interesting alliance, to be sure. Digital asset management is an arena ripe for growth and it has not gotten the wide-spread traction I believe it deserves. For publishers and R & D operations the productivity gains can be huge and this combined offering may intensify focus on an under-leveraged technology by ensuing high security and excellent retrieval. Looking at the headline, I would just advise that they pare down the labeling to something pithy and memorable.

X1 Technologies Releases Updates to the X1 Professional Client and the X1 Content Connector for Symantec Enterprise Vault 4/27/2009

X1 is gaining some serious traction and I know it appeals to engineers who like to maintain good order with their piles of data, particularly the flow of large quantities that show up in email and feeds. I spent a few hours four years ago with an engineer, an X1 devotee, who had tagged his email in text files scrupulously and then used X1 to index them every night. He swore by its value and reliability. This looks like they recognize the service they provide to customers who live in email and need to master their desktop domain. Theirs is a niche with a large audience to capture.

ISYS Search Software Announces Release of ISYS:sdk 9. April 28, 2009. Newest Version of Company's Integration Kit Offers Dramatic Performance and Scalability Enhancements, Intelligent Content Analysis and Parametric Search.

ISYS made some significant management changes over the past few months and they are clearly moving along with their marketing efforts as they recognize the value of expanding the re-seller partnership options. Customer comments that come my way continue to be favorable and they have a good story to tell.

Data Search Technology Used by FBI Makes its Way to Enterprises. eWeek New York, NY, April 29, 2009

Add Chiliad to the list of platform search engines, now that they are being highlighted for their value at the FBI. With deep (20+ years) roots in government programs (including early DARPA research and later the SBIR) and a burst of interest and investment by the government after 9/11, Chiliad is taking its venture into more commercial opportunities. We will see how they stack up against the big players in the marketplace. They must have learned something as they worked to "connect the dots" for the FBI.

There have been a lot more stories this past month, but these notices are the ones that kept me engaged in contemplating the enterprise search marketplace that just keeps putting up more options.

Your best expert resource for discovering products and tools for your enterprise is the network you trust most and communicate with the most comfortably. It is well established that a great trait to bring into any professional situation is the ability to listen. Sometimes it is hard to remember that when you are being asked a lot of questions. So, the best way to get a jump start on listening is to come to professional meetings with a list of questions you want to get answered before the meeting wraps up.

One of my own discoveries is that whether I am conducting a meeting, moderating or just attending, seeking out people who might have experiences that could be educational for me is both a way to get into a nice business relationship but it also helps break the ice. It can be awkward going to meetings where we know nobody in advance. Having an agenda that involves meeting people is the ultimate networking model. You might notice that a lot of social networking sites, like LinkedIn, have included a function for asking questions. This has proven popular and I know several people who have leveraged it in beneficial ways.

I have just come from two days at the Infonortics Search Engine meeting and many of you will soon be attending the Enterprise Search Summit in New York, The Gilbane Group conference in San Francisco or SemTech 2009 in San Jose. Here are a few suggestions on how to go shopping for great insight on search tools while establishing a relationship could nurture both you and those you engage for many years to come. Any one of these can start the conversation but think ahead about what you want to ask next once you have your initial answer:

Q: Hi, are you at this conference because you are just beginning to look for a search engine or to find answers about one you are already using? Depending on the answer you will want to find out what they have used, looked at, tested or are researching and what they have learned in the process.

Q: Hi, I see you are from ABC Corporation. How are you involved with search technology there? The answer will give you an idea what line of questioning you might pursue based on the person's presumed experience and knowledge. IT people, developers, content managers or expert searchers will each have a different view of the technologies they have or would like to use. Any role offers a unique perspective for you to draw out and understand for your own institution. Knowing how different professionals view search in other organizations can give you insight into the people you may have to team with in your own organization.

Q: Have you heard any talks at this meeting that have been particularly helpful for you? What have you learned that you didn't know about before? Follow up, and if you sense that some expertise you have might be interesting, sharing it can begin to build a trusted exchange that might prove helpful to you both.

Q: What are a couple of mandatory requirements for a search engine in your organization? Have you been using anything recently that you feel is serving you well or are you having problems? Any time you get a response from another attendee that indicates they are experienced and engaged with specific products, learn everything you can about their: selection process, implementation, deployment and user experiences. Talk to them about what their objectives were and whether and how those were met.

Going to meetings, chatting up attendees, asking questions, and sharing what you know are great ways to build a community of practice outside your internal communities. This brings fresh insights and gives you a valuable networking resource. Don't leave without contact information so you can continue the dialogue. Continue it with online exchanges based on their preference for communication.

Finally, the expense of going to meetings is increasingly hard to justify. But the benefit of finding key vendors and others with a common purpose in one place where you can quickly coalesce around the topic of search (or any other topic) gives you an easy sociability that can then be sustained. To solidify what you have learned and from whom, write a trip report; broadly disseminate it to all those in your enterprise network or team, as well as your boss. This sharing will be appreciated and should underscore the value you know how to accrue from technical meetings. Learning is an essential part of job growth and letting others know that you do it well is important.

Having been mired for several weeks in a technological misalignment of the stars, I have to question how social tools (the technological kind) might have saved me boatloads of aggravation and time. Consider having all of these happen in one month:

• Wireless router that couldn't support wireless (waiting for second replacement)
• IBM ThinkPad power adapter not usable with Lenovo ThinkPad
• Cable service not able to get a signal from street down my 1,000 ft. driveway
• Two cable modem failures and replacements
• ISP spam blocker blocking good stuff but does not retain it as suspect mail for review
• 10 hours of downtime from my web hosting/e-mail service provider

As one who guides and advises companies on enterprise search selection, implementation and deployment, and various aspects of knowledge asset management, it is a little ironic that I have my own challenges finding quality answers and knowledge to support my home office. I have used these tools in my search for answers:

• Phone - vendor customer service
• Chat - vendor website customer service
• Email - vendor customer service, and to some colleagues for advice
• Web searching - vendor site search, Internet general search engines
• Twitter - comments about troubles; search for similar comments by others

So far, phone discussions have been the only pathway to resolutions, and in one case a technician's house call was required. Most of the issues are still open, however emails and automated phone calls solicit feedback about my satisfaction with support services daily.

What does this have to do with search? I am searching to solve very specific problems, not an uncommon reason to search within the enterprise. As an independent consultant, my "enterprise" is my professional network, the support services I pay for and the WWW. When I fail to garner information I need from electronic sources, I reach out directly to experts in my personal network for answers. Even then, I find electronic dialog mechanisms that require typing a back-and-forth Q & A session to be pretty painful. Usually, one of us resorts to the phone or an in-person session to "see" what is really going on.

What have I learned? 1. When a resolution is needed quickly and efficiently, talking to someone who is really an expert is the best path. 2. When I can't find the answer on-line, I need to find an expert. 3. When I can't find an answer or an expert, I flounder and waste huge amounts of time.

Conclusion: Social tools (public platforms, social search, email, and even phone) require substantive work or communication skill by participants to establish a benefit from communication interchanges. Contextual hooks are needed to improve the results of information exchanges. Socializing is critical to expanding our networks of experts in a way that builds relationships in which we can freely reach out and expect a productive dialogue when we have a need to know. This is something to work at and consider when we embrace social technologies. It isn't the technology tool that makes us social, it is the surrounding sharing and communicating (aka socializing) that breeds the trusting and trusted relationships that will improve our search for answers. Social networks and platforms may give us the tools to search for and share content. But it is the socializing that adds rich context to make it more likely that the expert we want and the answers we seek are the most beneficial.

One of the LinkedIn groups I belong to has a great discussion started by Tom Burgmans , Enterprise Search Specialist at Wolters Kluwer, a publisher. The group is Enterprise Search Engine Professionals and has over 1,600 members. Tom began a discussion with this question: FAST Technical Users Group? As I read his call to action by the FAST user community, and the subsequent cheers in response from group members, I was delighted to see the swell of support. Here's why.

This is a perfect example of where social tools meet a need. A suggestion I also made as a panelist at FastForward 2009 has emerged spontaneously as a direct result of market forces. My observation had been that the FAST user conference was largely attended by IT folks, and the overwhelming number of keynotes and session topics focused on social tools, not especially tied directly to search either. A recommended call to action directed to Microsoft was that they host a platform of social tools to facilitate genuine user community sharing around the FAST product. The people who most need this are search administrators and content managers who presumably have some governance responsibilities for searchable content.

In Tom's suggestion we see the effective use of a social tool to generate interest among members, a large and focused audience who serve as a great test of the viability of his idea. That is neat!

Almost 30 years ago when I ran a software company, we (the company) organized and ran annual user group meetings in tandem with a large professional conference that most of our customers attended. These meetings were very successful, well attended by 40 - 50% of our customers. Over almost 20 years the group spawned a lot of professional and collegial relationships that gave our small user community a sense of collective investment in furthering the improvement and support of the product around which they met. Efforts to turn over total control of the user group to the community were not successful because, in those days, the infrastructure needed for planning, organizing and running meetings across the North American geography did not exist. My company provided that support mechanism out of necessity.

However, three regional user groups began their own programs to share knowledge, and the entire user community collectively published a "cookbook" of source code for reports that many of the users had built for use with the database application and wanted to share with others.

Today the opportunities for building these communities of practice have a vast number of "free" social tools to employ, so that barrier has gone away. More important, the benefits to the user community are limitless. It gets to drive discussion about the product, share hints, workarounds, and tips for successful implementations. The user community gets to decide what is important, what is needed in the knowledge-base of operational information. It can call for product changes, improvements and use social platforms for galvanizing the community around specific issues.

One of the best outcomes we saw with our own user community was around a visitation day at our offices for customers to meet together to "test-drive" an alpha version of a major new release. We purposely stayed out of the meeting for an extended period. Later we learned that when each had developed a "wish list" of changes and tweaks to the release, some rather marginal choices had died a natural death as a result of the "wisdom of the crowd." This was an ideal scenario for us as a development company because we did not have to disappoint any individual users with a unilateral decision to reject their ideas.

Trust me when I recommend to the enterprise search user community, you will empower yourselves in ways you can't imagine when you join forces with other customers to drive the improvements and success of any product you use and value.

When search fails me, the reasons may be hard to discover as a user but once on the inside of an enterprise I can learn a lot about what is going on. After listening to scores of business case studies, personal experiences and reading about rampant dissatisfaction with search it is discouraging to recognize the simple reasons for most negative outcomes.

Consider this scenario. I was attempting to find the address of the office of a major global platform vendor (one of the largest) that sells an entire suite of enterprise search and content management software products. One can usually find business location information from links on the home page of any corporate Web site or at least from the site representing the division one is visiting. But there was no such link for this corporate site. Then using the "search" box and later the "advanced search" option, trying a dozen variations of the division name, town in which the office is located, and product names I struck out on every query. All paths lead to a page with a single corporate address, or a couple of other remote addresses, and links to web pages that contained no address. Even those pages with addresses had no link to directions. I followed up with queries using Google and these got me back to the same dead-ends. Finally, I found the address through various online non-specific business directories.

This experience lead to a couple of conclusions about why my search failed: 1. The content does not exist; there is no such listing of locations. 2. The search engine is not properly tuned or metadata is not supplied with labels such as "locations," "directions," "business offices," etc. The immediate solution for this case is to ensure that someone with practical business sense and usability competency has ownership of the overall web site experience to make sure that essential company data is available and easy to find. Or, if the company has made a conscious decision not to publish that information, at the least they should have a page stating the alternative for potential visitors as to how they can find their destination or to what office they can direct postal mail.

I had to two reasons for needing this information; one was a visit to an individual who was not available to give me the address in time to reach the office, and the second was a personal follow-up letter after someone from the company had been a speaker at an event I chaired. As things stand, I have been left with personal skepticism about the commitment of this company to build, produce and actually use content management or search products that will be truly responsive to needs of their potential buyers. When you don't or can't showcase your products, I question "why." This is not a technology problem; it is a human factors and human resource allocation problem.

This brings me to some search fundamentals:
• No content - If content that customers or employees expect to find is not included in explicit directives to the search engine for the repositories to be crawled and indexed, it will never be found.
• No metadata - Any content lacking explicit language likely to be used by a searcher will probably not be found if it also lacks sufficient metadata.
• Poor indexing or search rule base - If the content being searched is business documents without many unique contextual "hooks," such as product names, technical terminology or topics of narrow interest, the search engine being used must be "smart" enough to glean the intent of the searcher from the context of query. In my case, I supplied a half a dozen terms to layer the context, tried them in different combinations, with and without quotations around phrases, but nothing worked.

Conclusion, if you really don't want searchers to find what they want to find, it is not hard at all to compromise findability. I will not arrive at my destination and you won't get any first class letters from me.

In keeping with conventional wisdom, it looks like a number of entrepreneurs are using the economic downturn as opportunity time, judging from the larger than normal number of announcements in the enterprise search sector. The Microsoft acquisition of FAST, Autonomy's foray into the document/content management market, and Google's Search Appliance ramping its customer base are old news BUT we have a sweep of changes. Newcomers to the enterprise search marketplace and news of innovative releases of mature products really perked up in March. Here are my favorite announcements and events in chronological order and the reasons why I find them interesting:

Travis, Paul. March 2, 2009 Digital Reef Comes Out of Stealth Mode. 03/02/2009. Byteandswitch.com.

Startup offers content management platform to index unstructured data for use in e-discovery, risk mitigation, and storage optimization. Here is the first evidence that entrepreneurs see opportunity for filling a niche vacuum. In the legal market the options have been limited and pretty costly, especially for small firms. This will be an interesting one to watch. http://www.digitalreefinc.com/

Banking, Finance, and Investment Taxonomy Now Available from the the Taxonomy Experts at WAND. 03/02/2009, PR Web (press release), Ferndale,WA,USA

The taxonomy experts at WAND have made this financial taxonomy available now for integration into any enterprise search software. I have been talking with Ross Lehr, CEO at Wand, for over a year about his suite of vertical market taxonomies and how best to leverage them. I am delighted that Wand is now actively engaged with a number of enterprise search and content management firms, enabling them to better support their customers' need for navigation. The Wand taxonomies offer a launching point from which organizations can customize and enhance the vocabulary to match their internal or customer interests. http://www.wandinc.com/main/default.aspx

Miller, Mark. Lucid Imagination » Add our Lucene Ecosystem Search Engine to Firefox. 03/02/2009

I predicted back in January that open source search and search appliances were going to spawn a whole new industry of services providers and expert integrators because there are just not enough search experts to staff in-house experts in all the companies that are adopting these two types of search products. Well, it is happening and these guys at Lucid are some of the smartest search technologists around. Here is an announcement that introduces you to a taste of what they can do. Check it out and check them out at http://www.lucidimagination.com/

To see the full article with commentary about: social search at NASA, QueSearch, MaxxCat, Aardvark on social search, Attivio, ConceptSearching, Google user-group, Simplexo, Endeca, Linguamatics, Coveo, dtSearch and ISYS ...

A couple of years ago the Gilbane Group rolled out a service it calls, Gilbane Analysts On Demand. The idea was that a company could subscribe to access to Gilbane's lead and senior analysts for an unlimited number of short calls each year, across all the practice areas. I championed the idea and have suggested it as a good service for start-up content and search related companies. It is a good way for them to pick the brains of experts who have a lot of experience in their particular market niche or to cast about for a different perspective on how they might better approach their marketing, product expansion or services. I've had questions related to positioning, possible names or "tag lines," pricing, and the type of partners a company might want to seek. I also encourage clients to talk to me about "what customers want" in terms of packaging and delivery. In 30 minutes to an hour, a lot of valuable information can be conveyed and, as an analyst I love helping companies think through a solution efficiently. Sometimes, just talking through the issue brings them to an obvious answer or to a better question to have answered. Business guidance seems to prevail over "enterprise search."

Now that we have had a little experience with this type of service, I have decided that it would serve technology "buyers," just as well. The service might prove even more effective for some companies than a lengthy contract for consulting services. Companies devote long lead times to thinking about, budgeting, selecting and procuring software solutions. Most of them don't want a consultant waiting in the wings for the next evolution in a project. What they would like is an expert they can turn to at each project gate where a pivotal decision needs to be made, or for a little guidance on an approach or what the next step should be. As an analyst, talking to technology customers is valuable because I can hear customer thoughts and ideas about products and companies and then present these as anonymous feedback when appropriate.

The Gilbane Group has a long reputation for product independence. Our sponsored research, white papers and webinars focus on timely topical themes, not product briefings or marketing buzz for a particular client. We help vendors get out educational messages about how they view markets, customer needs, tool implementation and strategies for leveraging technologies. We give voice to the values they espouse as companies. When we work for a vendor, we also share advice about how they are perceived in the marketplace, and how to improve their brand because we believe that good and healthy companies make for a vibrant marketplace.

I've been told, "off-the-record," that, while the Gilbane model is laudable, no vendor believes in true analyst or consultant independence. While I am sorry to hear that this might be the prevailing view, it is like saying that no bank can be trusted because of the current financial crisis. Are you hiding your money under the mattress, yet?

Not only are we a trustworthy resource - we have a lot of good people with terrific expertise. Check out the cast of characters at: Gilbane Contacts and consider how great it would be to have them all a phone call or email communication away. Just a thought.