Enterprise search grows up

Dan Keldsen on his BizTechTalk podcast talked to Raul Valdes-Perez of Vivisimo, an enterprise search provider, in Enterprise Search Grows Up.

Search has been around for a long time [and yet] search technology in and of itself is experiencing a revolution!

The revolution brings usability across the board, to users, to administrators, and to content managers looking to get the most bang out of the content as they can. In this interview with Raul Valdes-Perez, CEO and Co-founder of Vivisimo, we discuss what Vivisimo has been targeting to push Enterprise Search through it's next growth spurt.

The other thing I enjoyed about this show was the way Keldsen and Valdes-Perez built up the case for why there is a change afoot in enterprise search.  For people that have been paying attention to this topic for a while, these things may not be terribly new.

Why usability?  Because everyone (users and administrators) have experience with the simplicity of Google: the software should be easy on the eyes, but it should also be easy to setup and revise. 

What is it about the enterprise that makes "search" harder?  Content is locked away in many different types of repositories: web sites; document management systems; file shares.  So, you need to "federate" the search across all these sources. 

And my favorite quote?  "Most content is not worth finding."  It is poorly written or simply irrelevant.  On the web, the worthless content is not linked and it ends up at the bottom of search results.  In a company?  There is no cross-linking or other social context to the content that gives clues.