Enterprise Search Dead? Or just misunderstood?

Search experts including Steve Arnold in his Beyond Search blog and Leslie Owens of Forrester Research have written the obituary for 'enterprise search', that monolithic 'one size fits all, everywhere' scheme that leading search vendors have pushed for years. Others, including Tony Byrne, publisher of CMS Watch, differ.

While there's no question that all of the major vendors were pushing this flawed model - along with the magic beans of single-shot relevancy, I don't think we've ever really seen a full-blown, 100%, all-encompassing 'enterprise search' implementation of the sort that Steve, Leslie, and the other analysts have pronounced dead.

What we see in successful implementations is what we'd have to call distributed search. Most companies have anywhere from 2 to 5 search solutions, typically from several vendors. The public web site may use a Google Search Appliance; the Intranet uses FAST and/or SharePoint; Corporate Legal uses Autonomy's Zantaz; and Customer Support may use InQuira. And of course each of the divisions and web sites throughout the company will have Endeca, DieselPoint, a few Lucene/Solr sites, and maybe an old Perl script written in 1998.

The real trick is to glue these technologies together not into a single giant searchable index, but to combine them together logically so the user does not need to know where to look for specific content. We, like many others, call this Federated Search, and have written about it any number of times in our newsletter.

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