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Federated enterprise search – ten questions for search vendors and one for the search manager
Implementing federated search is a seriously challenging project. It is not until every repository is on-boarded and there has been six months of user operation that you will be confident that you have a satisfactory search experience. That is probably 18 months after...
“Why can’t our enterprise search be like Google?”
I’ve lost count of the number of occasions I have had this question from senior managers. Listening to a virtuoso presentation from Karen Blakeman as one of the ISKO UK/BCS IRSG Exploring Information Retrieval lectures yesterday caused me to realise that I had not...
Understanding and ameliorating the dark side of digital workplaces
Although arguably the first digital workplace was PLATO Group Notes in 1976, the concept of the digital workplace is usually attributed to Jeffery Bier. Bier founded Instinctive Technologies in 1996 to provide collaboration applications based on the knowledge that...
Exalead slips out of sight within NetVibes
The history of Exalead starts with the development of the Alta Vista web search application in 1995. An important feature of Alta Vista was the adoption of a 64-bit architecture based on the Digital Equipment Alpha chip set. This was extremely fast but was also very...
Enterprise search vendor BAInsight acquired by Upland Software
Last week came the announcement that Boston-based search company BAInsight had been acquired by Upland Software. BAInsight was founded by Guy Mounier and his colleagues in 2004 and was initially focused on adding functionality and significant value to the early...
Explainable AI and ML– where is the search software industry commitment?
Over the last few years there has been a very significant increase in the attention being paid to explainable AI, partly as an outcome of new regulations that have been proposed by the European Union. One of the earliest papers (2017) on the topic was authored by...
A brief history of ‘vector search’
Hardly a day goes by without an announcement from a search software business of how clever the company has been to develop a dense vector approach to the similarity matching of documents (‘document’ used in its generic form). The impression is created is that this is...
Profiling enterprise search vendors – why so little transparency?
Reviewing the Clearbox Consulting report that profiles in considerable (30pp per vendor) detail intranet and employee experience applications has caused me to reflect on the lack of anything similar for the enterprise search and e-commerce search sectors. The Real...
Intranet and Employee Experience Platforms 2022 report from ClearBox Consulting
Over the last six years ClearBox Consulting has published a range of reports which present detailed profiles of SharePoint-based and independent intranet vendors and employee communication applications. The range, depth and authority of these reports is matched only...
Twelve ways in which enterprise search is different and difficult
These are the first twelve that came to mind – there are many more! This is why you need a good search support team, information management and search management strategies, extensible technology from a vendor you can talk to and a range of training and mentoring...
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