Exalead Blog - The blog of Exalead

Editor’s Note: We often speak to some incredibly experienced and insightful people who are in the trenches in the information access space. When this happens, we like to ask them about trends they see in the marketplace. To this end, we will periodically publish their thoughts on this blog. As an example, we recently had a conversation with an experienced search professional employed at a Fortune 500 bank. We need to keep his name and employer a secret – but his observations are worth sharing.

People talk about the evolution of search (and search technology). Underlying those conversations is the evolution of the type of data that enterprises generate (from mostly structured to mostly unstructured) and where this data is coming from (from the database to … well … every source imaginable).

But there’s another interesting industry evolution worth examining: the shift in the use of specialized, expensive niche search technologies in the late 90s toward the broad, flexible powerful search platforms we see today.

In the late 90’s, many technologies focused on one task such as natural language query, adaptive pattern recognition, fuzzy logic or topic-specific glossary weighting. With the amount of the investment made into developing each of these technologies, a lot of us thought that the industry would trend toward small, niche providers whose solutions could be brought in-house and fine-tuned to fit the needs of the end-user enterprise.

But it wasn’t to be.

The cost of niche best-of-breed search products became prohibitive – which was a shame because the technologies had advanced so much. Building, utilizing and maintaining that infrastructure was just too expensive.

Today, however, we are seeing the broad information access providers like Exalead build much of that best-of-breed natural language query, adaptive pattern recognition, fuzzy logic and topic-specific glossary weighting technology into their search platforms. We are also seeing that these solutions are increasingly replacing older technologies — such as relational databases — at a lower cost.

As a result, the appeal of robust search solutions in the enterprise is growing quickly. It’s an exciting time to be in enterprise search – we are finally realizing the power and promise of many of the best-of-breed solutions we first saw a decade ago.