Enterprising search and content?
Jinfo Blog

By Joanna Ptolomey

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I believe that most of you will agree with me that there is no shortage of content – within organisations or outside. In fact, when thinking about enterprise content I am often reminded of the TV reality show Hoarders. The inability to part with belongings can take people to the edge of crisis. I think it can take organisations there too, they get so overwhelmed with content it becomes almost useless.

Theresa Regali, the Real Story Group, agrees, and at #online11 provided some interesting thoughts on discovery searching within the enterprise.

In the nearly 15 years that I have been a professional searcher I have become accustomed to thinking about the different ways in which content can be presented. Could it be a research paper, a government report, an Excel spreadsheet, a video podcast or a discussion? However not everyone thinks like this, and in some sense people don’t know what they don’t know.

Discovery search can help bring content to the fore that was hidden or not considered by people searching before. Core text content is important, but video and comments/discussion comprise important content that needs to be considered too. I discovered this recently on a project where I investigated different types of content. I was looking at BBC Scotland to see how they tag film content to aid workflow, and also to sell content later to other organisations. The comments and discussion are just as important too. What about metadata with no text, for example searching for colours using a colour palette selector?

Searching for content in a more meaningful way has been a trend for quite a few years now and it requires tagging to be done without a lot of manual input. Regali thinks that there is a dearth of innovation at the moment, but European vendors are starting to lead the way in and Polysoft, Exalead, Siriequa, Smartlogic, Funnelback, Intrafind and Fabasoft are following. She also considers open source Lucene (base code) and Solr (platform) as having a strong foothold. They are already in great use by commercial vendors.

Tips on choosing a discovery search vendor. Decide whether you want a specialist vendor that only does discovery or one that can do other things for your organisation such as IBM. Risk is a factor so identify who is changing their product rapidly to keep up to date. If you want to stay ahead of the curve then this could be the vendor for you.

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