donderdag 28 mei 2009

federated search redefined... more like distributed indexing

Through Linked-In I was pointed to a blog about a new kind of search or another way that the term "federated search" could be defined.

“The triumph of the distributed Web.” He said the aggregate power of distributed human activity will trump centralized control. His main point was that Google, and other search engines that analyze the Web and links, are much less useful than a (theoretical) search engine that knows not what people have linked to (as Google does), but rather what pages are open on people’s browsers at the moment that people are searching. “All the problems of search would be solved if search relevance was ranked by what browsers were displaying,” he said.
source: http://federatedsearchblog.com/2009/05/27/a-new-paradigm-for-federated-search/

I like the idea but I am confused about the fact that they are calling this "federated search".

In the enterprise search world we define "Federated search" as the distribution of a search action over two or more search environments. The "distributed" engines deliver results and those results are aggregated by the centralized search engine and presented to the user.

I think it would be more appropriate to name the mentioned method of indexing "distributed indexing" or "federated indexing".

vrijdag 15 mei 2009

Enterprise search will never be able to search the enterprise


http://dominicfallows.co.uk/2009/05/14/it-is-getting-too-clever-by-half/

Users of enterprise search technologies report that the enterprise will never be searchable ­ – there is just too much private (and valuable) information sitting on PCs and in obscure systems that use strange data formats. Service-oriented architectures typically fail to provide services and degrade into expensive mechanisms for providing limited interoperability between systems. And so on.

I am sure that there is some organisation somewhere that lives up to the glossy images we find in supplier brochures ­ – where everything is under control, and senior management look on approvingly as some smart, attractive, thirty-something professionals adjust a few parameters in the business performance management system. It's just that I've never come across such a thing ­ – and neither will you.


I must disagree with the author on this. Of course it is a challenge to make all data in an organization searchable. With the current indexing and search tools like Autonomy or Google most problems and obscure data formats can be handled. The experience that we have is that there a very few organizations that have a vision on that field.

donderdag 14 mei 2009

Google add a page to a result

I didn't know that this feature existed.
You can add a page that you missed in de result to the result page of a specific query.

Another brilliant idea from the boys of Google. This way you collect "best results" with the direct input from (active) users.
A similar functionality is the "SearchWiki" which let you add comments to pages in the results that are return by a query.