Archive for the ‘Future development’ Category

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Caroline Abrahamsson

Basic enterprise search is commodity – let’s go further! Trends for 2008

December 31 - 2007 | Caroline Abrahamsson

So looking ahead, what are the trends for enterprise search 2008?
Well, we have already been talking about Microsoft and IBM and there are a few other vendors (such as Google and Oracle) that have presented ways to develop their enterprise search solutions (looking at clustering, categorisation, taxonomies, entity extraction, visualisation etc.). To conclude: the simple search box is soon commodity – a search solution for enterprises has to go beyond this.

As a result, experts believe that 2008 will become a year with stronger cooperation and more strategic differentiation among the leading vendors. (more…)

Caroline Abrahamsson

How do you measure success on your intranet?

November 8 - 2007 | Caroline Abrahamsson

An intranet should, from my perspective, serve the people looking for general information as well as the ones who need specific information to solve an urgent task this very minute.
During the last few weeks I’ve been participating in many and interesting meetings which all have raised the question of how to measure success when it comes to finding content and people on your intranet. When working with enterprise search you often use the time you save as an important parameter. “If the users can find what they are looking for, then their everyday work will be more effective. Hereby we can save the user time and the company money”. This is an obvious truth, but I believe that there is more to consider. (more…)

Maria Johansson

Internet life in the future

October 1 - 2007 | Maria Johansson

I always think it’s nice when I hear people talking about the same things that are on my mind these days. It makes me reflect upon things in new ways and also makes me realize that I’m on to something. I attended a presentation by Björn Jeffery from Good Old (hosted by Västra Götalands Regionen). His talk on internet strategy was interesting and had many things in common with the keynote by Elizabeth Churchill (Yahoo) that I recently heard at the HCI2007 conference. Two things interested me most; the future of mobility and the inevitable question of integrity. So here are my thoughts today, on internet strategy and the future of internet usage.

(more…)

Caroline Abrahamsson

New challenges and leaders in the segment of Enterprise Search 2007

September 16 - 2007 | Caroline Abrahamsson

The yearly magic quadrant for Information Access Technology from Gartner has become an important way to evaluate the vendors in Enterprise Search business. The result is presented in a matrix measuring the different players by ability to execute (product, overall viability, customer experience etc.) and the completeness of their vision (offering strategy, innovation etc.). The vendors are then positioned as niche players (a rather crowded spot), visionaries, challengers and leaders.

For the last couple of years the upper right corner, which includes the leaders, has been a yearly fight between FAST Search & Transfer, Autonomy, Verity (which was bought by Autonomy in 2005) and Endeca.

However, the magic quadrant for 2007 shows that there is a substantial change in the market and two new leaders as well as two new large vendors on the challenging spot are represented. (more…)

Karl Jansson

Interesting new search features

August 14 - 2007 | Karl Jansson

Out on the web there are a large number of small search engines that try to stand out and maybe take some of the market shares from Google.

I would like to introduce some of them in order to help other realize that search can (and should) be a bit more then a search bar and a list of hits. A number of these alternative search engines have focused on the visual presentation of the search result in interesting ways. For example the search engine quintura uses tag clouds of related terms and concepts to the original query.

A slightly different approach has been taken by mnemomap and webbrain that presents related concepts in a graph instead. The other part is to visually show the divisions of the search results into different categories so they can easily be navigated through but also to give a quick overview of the subject, examples of that can be seen at e.g. mooter and kooltorch. Finally I would also like to mention kartOO that have, in my opinion, gone one step further and even presents the links to the search results with images and icons. (more…)

Caroline Abrahamsson

The flexibility of internet search

August 12 - 2007 | Caroline Abrahamsson

The expression “have you googled it?” meaning “have you search for it on the internet?” shows what an impact the worlds most valuable brand has made on people.

However, new development has provided several new and flexible ways of using search. The traditional way of searching often helps you find specific information that you know exist (presented in endless hit lists). Another approach is to let search help you find the things you didn’t know existed, but most likely help you put things into new perspectives.

One example is the recommended search solutions, such as music map or live plasma, which finds music or movies that are related to your search term and that you most likely will appreciate. Another example is what to rent that, by using different people’s preferences and searches, can recommend a good movie for your weekend. (more…)

Maria Johansson

A Change of Focus; or Control vs Openness part two

July 28 - 2007 | Maria Johansson

A lot of the people I meet in my work use these new web 2.0 tools daily. They ask me why metadata and taxonomies have to be so complicated when you can do “that web 2.0 stuff” with tagging. They say they prefer “the easy way” and prefer folksonomies over structures; they don’t think they can trust the structures anyway. People, who would like to work in an organization like Charlies.

Traditionally intranets are about control; we want to control what information people get and when and how they get it, instead of trying to make sure that people have the information they need when they need it.
I did some sketches for a search driven portal the other day. One of the comments I got was: “Wow! Why can’t we do that?”

(more…)

Maria Johansson

The right information at the right time; or Control vs Openness

July 13 - 2007 | Maria Johansson

There is obviously a difference between what people want and do and what the organisations think and want to do.
I saw a good definition of what enterprise 2.0 is the other day. Meet Charlie is a good example of how web 2.0 tools can be used in the enterprise area. Because people do use them; these new tools have changed the way we communicate and collaborate. If your not an organization that is.

(more…)

Daniel Johansson

Search-driven process to increase content quality

July 9 - 2007 | Daniel Johansson

Experience from recent and ongoing search and retrieval projects have shown that enterprises have got a better and deeper insight in their content when deploying a new search platform. Not only in unstructured content repositories, but also in structured sources. As information is indexed and is visualized in a more user friendly way it doesn’t take much time before the people responsible find content issues that are brought out in the light. Content that e.g. is misplaced, tagged wrongly, documents with poorly defined security information etc. Issues that earlier were hidden due to lack of a holistic view of content. (more…)

Helge Legernes

The evolution of search in video media

June 27 - 2007 | Helge Legernes

Search is becoming more and more an infrastructure necessity and in some areas, and for some users, considered a commodity. However, the evolution of new areas for use of search is growing rapidly both on the web and within the enterprises. Google’s recent acquisition of YouTube is giving us one example of new areas. Searching in video material is not simple and I believe we have just seen the very early stage of this new technique. (more…)

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