Up to speed on search

It occurred to me the other day that technology is probably the only industry in which the lingua franca of the day is so rapidly displaced by a new set of buzz words, which end up confusing buyers and making marketing men lots of filthy lucre. Enterprise Content Management is so broad a term it lets the vendor community brand their products as "ECM", when they may only cover one small part of the full functionality needed to provide a holistic solution. And enterprise search is another. When you hear the term enterprise search it sounds like you're getting a Google-type experience for behind the firewall – but of course it's a little bit more complicated than this, despite what some of the vendors may tell you.

Autonomy chief executive Mike Lynch was particularly keen to tell me the difference between his firm's technology and those of some of the smaller players in this market. In fact, he went so far as to compare certain search technologies to planes, and others to mere bikes: the latter being fine for a trip back from the shops, he said, but probably not a great way to get to the States. Analogies aside though, the difference between the incumbent high end players and the likes of Sinequa, Exalead, Vivisimo and others at the mid to low end can be significant, despite these less-well known firms offering functionality that will suite many organisations just fine thanks very much.

Lynch waxed lyrical in particular about implicit query functionality, which could redefine what we understand by search. Gone is the search box on a user's screen, and instead the technology works in the background to automatically read the information on a user's screen, retrieving and displaying enterprise materials related to that content.

Then there is Autonomy's own Automated Query Guidance, which presents the user with queries based on different contexts, so that the user can be sure the most applicable one is returned. Lynch also pointed to audio and video search as two other areas the company is investing resources in.

Search has really grown in sophistication over the last few years. For some these extra bells and whistles won't be important, but increasingly enterprise search is an inadequate term to describe all that's out there. Autonomy itself is moving more and more into the e-discovery space, for example – a canny move given the potential size of the market and legislative drivers at play.