December 1, 2010 – Speakers at the Enterprise Search Summit, held November 16-18 in Washington, D.C., united in expressing the opinion that effective search is not a challenge that can be met by technology alone.
EContent brought this information to our attention in their article “Enterprise Search Summit Fall 2010: It Takes More than Technology to Make Search Work.” It seems the first speaker to raise the issue was Daniel Rasmus, consultant and author of Management by Design. Rasmus suggested that search improvements tend to focus on either superficial improvements such as user interface or things that benefit the search engine’s creators in some way, rather than efforts to actually improve a user’s ability to locate and manage information.
Speakers following later that same day questioned how far technology alone can go to improve search. It seems they think enterprise content and search aren’t living up to their potential, and to achieve effective search requires more than just the latest technology. The most interesting point they made is one we can agree with — the best search engine available won’t make up for a poor implementation or bad taxonomy.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
