Jan
John Blossom, President and senior analyst for Shore Communications, writes a compelling article in Shore’s ContentBlogger that is a must-read. Beyond Search Engines: The Database is Now is more than a catchy title; it’s one of those articles that portends a powerful paradigm shift in the search industry that is already well underway.
Blossom’s message to search vendors, especially federated search vendors, is simple and clear: Don’t focus just on the content from known sources you make available to users; Get good at mining useful information from sources whose structure is not simple and is ever-changing. With the exponential growth in the volume of content, it is no longer sufficient to bring together search results from a number of databases from a list and be smug in the feeling that we are on the leading edge when we provide federated search. An important, but not the most important question, as Blossom states in his article, is “[how] to deal with organizing and delivering content when the Web and many private content collections measure in petabytes and exabytes of information.” I think that many of us in the federated search industry believe that finding the most relevant handful of documents in the proverbial haystack is sufficient but in the context of organizing and delivering data that leads to actionable intelligence I believe the industry has a long way to go.
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