Blog
Search eight ways
At the present moment ‘search’ is being used by the AI community (especially in the context of ChatGPT) as a generic product. The reality is that there are at least eight facets of search, each with their own particular requirements. A very brief (and inevitably...
The enterprise search vendor business is becoming rather crowded!
I have now updated my list of enterprise search vendors, and was quite surprised to find that since January last year only two had disappeared but 17 had arrived, taking the total to 87. I’m sure this is not a comprehensive list. If the company you work for, or use,...
Intranet Focus Ltd (1999-2022) to SearchResearch Online (2023-?)
Welcome to my new web site, blog and role. Intranet Focus Ltd no longer exists though my email address will remain the same and for the time being I will continue to Tweet as Intranet Focus. I started tracking developments in search technology in the mid-1970s when...
Search Solutions 2022 Conference report. Part 2 The Afternoon Sessions and Awards
After lunch Farhad Shokraneh gave a quite impassioned paper about the problems that systematic searching gives rise to in a paper entitled ‘Futures of Systematic Searching’ in which the plural was not a spelling mistake! Farad started out describing the process of...
Search Solutions 2022 Conference report. Part 1 The Morning Sessions
Search Solutions is managed by the Information Retrieval Specialist Group of the British Computer Society and is the only broad-spectrum search event outside of the USA. The conference was held at the BCS London office on 23 November, preceded by a day of Tutorials....
Ethical and social considerations of expert identification
For many years I have expressed my reservations about how effective enterprise search can be in identifying experts within an organisation. Yet this remains a core ‘benefit’ that is visibly promoted by search vendors. Often I feel like a voice crying in the wilderness...
Search research categorized
Over the last few years I have been collecting and collating research papers and conference papers that are in some way relevant to enterprise search. There are very few ‘case studies’ of enterprise search implementations but there is a significant amount of research...
Assessing relevance and utility in enterprise search performance
The concept of ‘relevance’ lies at the core of enterprise search development and assessment. Many (too many!) vendors focus on the promise of presenting the most relevant results on the first search results page (SERP) using AI. The concept dates back to development...
Taxonomies – Practical Approaches to Developing and Managing Vocabularies for Digital Information – Helen Lippell (Editor)
There is probably no more difficult task in information management in being the Editor of a multi-author on any topic, and the level of difficulty goes up by an order of magnitude when the topic is taxonomy management. Taxonomies (and the strap line ‘Practical...
Making Knowledge Management Clickable – Joseph Hilger and Zack Wahl
There are many books about knowledge management but very few about what I might refer to as IKM (Information and Knowledge Management) technologies. What is distinctive about this book is that it spans the crevasse between KM and IT and does so with considerable...
Understanding Experience – a graphic novel guide to the principles of human-centered design
Attending the Intranet Italia Day in Milan last month I spotted a very unusual book on one of the exhibitions stands. In the business of intranet and digital workplace development we are constantly trying to develop interactive applications that deliver an intuitive...
The Science of Reading 2nd Edition Wiley Blackwell
It seems to be implicit in information retrieval research that ‘users’ have such a competence in reading that a consideration of reading ability can be discounted from the research analysis. If only that was the case! The reality is that perhaps one in ten employees...