The Search Network has released Search Insights 2020, the third in its annual series of free-of-charge/free of sponsorship surveys of currently important issues in search implementation. The format is the same as in Search Insights 2018 and Search Insights 2019 but with the significant expansion of the list of search vendors and specialist search integration companies, and a chronology of the development of enterprise search. Although we have used a consistent format virtually none of the topics in 2018 or 2019 are repeated in 2020. We aim just to focus in on core issues, not just fill 60 pages with text.

In 2019 we added some guest contributions, and this year we have three new authors. Paul Cleverley takes a very different and personal view of the development of enterprise search, Kurt Kragh Sorensen considers the outcomes of the IntraTeam benchmarking survey from a search perspective and Valentin Richter sets out the benefits and challenges of building and using connectors for federated search.

Other topics include an overview of the current status and likely development of Microsoft O365 search, whether expertise search can deliver experts, the importance of taxonomy design in enterprise search, the skills needed to become a relevance engineer, and the potential for natural language processing in search applications. In total there are ten contributions.

I am very grateful to my colleagues in The Search Network and our guest contributors for their support in writing such excellent contributions whilst also doing the day job. We depend on Val Skelton to make sure that we all keep to our self-imposed 1500-word limit and that we write for readers who may not have a detailed knowledge of search technology. Simon Flegg turns the manuscript into a stylish report.

It won’t be long before we start planning the 2021 edition – there are always more topics than we can fit in to the report!

Martin White