Recently in Enterprise Search Engines Category

"Law Offices have been at the forefront of the Enterprise Search market."  is the first sentence in an article about the evolution of enterprise search at the 450 attorney firm, Bracewell & Guilanai LLP -- Third Time a Charm for Law Firm, Network Computing, 10/16/2009.

Law firms at the forefront?  Really?  I'm not sure I'm buying that as a blanket statements, but it does seem to apply to Bracewell.  According to the article, they started out 20 years ago with Open Text, then moved to Autonomy, and are now happily searching using Recommind.  That's an impressive history of search engine implementation and evolution.

ILTA does the best job of offering educational seminars all year round of any association I've been involved with. You don't always have to be a member to benefit; the webinar they're offering, "When One Search is Not Enough: Case Studies in Using Multiple Work Product Retrieval Tools" is open to non-members, so whether you join, and you probably should, or not, you can also benefit.

We all know that there's no such thing as the one perfect work product solution. Every application has its weaknesses and strong points. Though the vendors are trying to come up with a one size fits all approach, they don't necessarily succeed. Some tools may work better for litigation, others for corporate documents. One search engine might do a great job of relevancy ranking, but lacks some other feature that you think is critical. Though no one wants the expense, the reality is that purchasing just work product retrieval tool may not be enough.

Now, how to convince your management of that is a whole other topic!

By the way, I went to a similar program last year at AALL. Even if you are only planning on purchasing one product, you can get no better information on how the different ones out there stack up than by listening to people who are working with more than one search tool. They know the comparative strengths and weaknesses like nobody else!

I've been seeing all sorts of announcements of new features and products created as a results of the Federal Rules of Evidence on eDiscovery; this one from Recommind iust one of them! See the Newsbreak article Recommind Adds eDiscovery to Mindserver for further details.

Somehow I missed this announcement. I was doing a little research on FAST, the search engine used by Lexis TotalSearch, when I came across their offer to be a "safe harbor" for Verity customers who are concerned about the future of the Verity search engine because of Autonomy's (currently pending) purchase of Verity. A little melodramatic, you might say, since I doubt Autonomy is going to pull the plug anytime soon. By the way, Verity is the full-text search engine behind Interwoven (iManage).

The acquisition isn't final yet, though they recently got the go-ahead from the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission.

Lately, enterprise search has been fighting the public's perception that an easy to use Google-like search is all that should be necessary in enterprise environment as well as the web. See "How Google Has Changed Enterprise Search." It's not easy being an enterprise search company these days.

Vendors selling enterprise search engines have to deal with the new reality, the Google reality, that exists in today's marketplace. Google, and it's entry into enterprise search with the Google Appliance, has shaken up the industry according to Stephen E. Arnold in "How Google Has Changed Enterprise Search", Searcher Magazine, Nov./Dec. 2004. (This article is available in full-text for $2.95 from the InfoToday web site.)

According to Arnold, enterprise search vendors are having a difficult explaining why their complex search products are better than the ease and simplicity of Google. Arnold includes a table comparing public web search and enterprise search, noting the significant differences in how they work and what they're required to do.

Considering Google's positive image, the relatively low cost of the Google appliance, and their good financial position, enterprise search may never be quite the same.

The people that brought you the Desktop Search Matrix, the Goebel Group, have another comparison you might find useful, the Search Appliance Matrix. Search appliances, which are epitomized, but not limited to, the Google Search Appliance, are search engines for your intranet in a package complete with everything that you need to easily implement them.

The matrix compares software from Google, Thunderstone, and Vivisimo and includes the file types indexed, the number of documents, and cost. It's definitely very handy if you're in the market.

When it comes to evaluating search engines, most of us don't know how and why they work the way they do, we just know what we like. And we like relevant search results. Unfortunately, that doesn't quite cut it if you are charged with choosing a search engine for your organization. Kim Guenther lists the important capabilities and features that you should look for in a search engine in her article "Choosing a Search Engine" in the Jan./Feb. issue of Online.

(Note to Reader: Online articles typically appear on Looksmart's FindArticles a few months after publication.)

Steve Arnold answers some of the most frequently asked questions about implementing an enterprise search engine in his article, 20 Questions (With Answers) About Enterprise Search (Online, July/August 2004). This kind of practical information can be hard to come by.
(The article isn't available on the web in full-text, but you'll find it soon on Factiva or Westlaw's ONLINE database within 6-8 weeks.)

Many of us think in terms of the Google search box as the ideal for providing access to information, but according to Arnold, only about half of Yahoo's users use the search box to get where they want to go. The "other half use a point-and-click approach to content....A search box is not a useful tool for about half of the populations's user." It sounds like there's still a place for a controlled vocabulary and browsable categories even in the age of more advanced enterprise search products.

I've had a white paper from Isys, called "Selecting an Intranet Search Engine" sitting on my desk for some time. It's time to tidy up, and I certainly don't want to lose track of it because there's some good stuff here, including an "Intranet Search Engine Requirements & Evaluation Checklist." So, what else, I figured I'd better blog it.

At Paul Hastings we spent considerable amount of effort last year reviewing various search technologies, both in terms of "universal" search (that is finding information/data from a multitude of sources) and more targeted search solutions, such as West KM. This said, we found the problems that the various approaches are solving are different and thus we elected to pursue a two-prong strategy covering both types of knowledge searches detailed below.

Document management systems (DMS) typically promise to provide robust full-text searching across entire document collections in an organization. In larger firms, which arguably have the most to gain by leveraging the knowledge housed in their DMS, that promise hasn't been realized, at least in part due to an inability to search across libraries in different locations, the lack of an intuitive search interface, and incorrect profiling by users. In connection with our discussion of enterprise search engines, Dennis Kennedy asks whether DMS are broken, and if so, what this means given the money spent on such systems. Very good questions...anyone have any answers?

Internet researchers accustomed to locating information from a variety of sources using search engines such as Google, are demanding a similar single method of access to their company's resources. In "Searching for ROI", (Econtent, May 2004), Robert J. Boeri points out that though the demand for enterprise search engines is increasing, it is also a hard sell in organizations where the routine question is, "What return on investment will search yield for the enterprise?" He discusses justifying enterprise search systems with several vendors including Verity, Autonomy and Tripplehop, but as he also points out, "Nobody asks for an ROI to prove the value of email systems."

Sorry guys, this one isn't available on the web, but it should appear on Westlaw in the DTBS database within 6-8 weeks.

According to PC Magazine, "search has become one of the hottest technologies in the computer industry." From products designed to search data on a single PC, to those aimed at small, medium or large companies, there is an ever growing number of vendors promoting full-text search products for document management systems(DMS), litigation support, databases, email, intranets, and some that try to do it all, high-end, enterprise search engines such as Autonomy, Verity and Recommind, just to name a few.

Where does WestKM and the Lexis Total Search products fit into the mix? Lisa Kellar, Practice Automation Manager at Hunton & Williams, explains the difference between these KM products and the enterprise search engines.

Valuable information in any organization can be spread across a variety of databases, intranet pages, and of course, document management systems.

I'm convinced that we need to stop requiring attorneys to figure out which data store contains the information that they need, but rather, provide a search engine that will pull all the firm's resources together, and present the appropriate content based on the search terms. Everyone wants something "Google-like", and I don't see why they can't have it! Apparently the law firm of Cleary, Gottlieb agrees. Brenton B. Miller describes their search for just such a product in a recent article in the Legal Times, The Engine that Could.