I can’t recall exactly when I started to blog but it was around 2004/2005. Once Twitter arrived in 2006 the combination of blogging and then using Twitter to raise awareness of blogs worked very well for me. I have always tracked published research quite diligently and it was a good feeling when I tweeted about a blog on some new element of search technology and within a couple of days had (for me) a sizeable number of hits on my site and a decent growth in Twitter followers. More important there was a search Twitter community that was exchanging views and ideas on a wide range of search topics.
I decided to close down Intranet Focus Ltd in 2022 and set up this site and blog with the aim of continuing to track and assess developments in enterprise-related search technology. Then came OpenAI and ChatGPT etc etc. The volume of published research quickly overwhelmed my ability to read and interpret it. However there was very little published on enterprise search but I still had to read through hundreds of papers a week to find just the one or two that had even a vague relevance to enterprise search management and satisfaction.
The time has come to face reality – this is not a good way to spend my day. So with sadness I am now discontinuing this blog, and in the near future this site.
I still have a keen interest in enterprise search, and much of what I have learned over the last twenty years still has relevance but remains unpublished and un-presented, other than to students at the Information School in the University of Sheffield where I remain a Visiting Professor. Any further contributions to the enterprise search community will be delivered through LinkedIn.
I am in the process of writing a second edition of my History of Enterprise Search, taking the end date to 2024 and making a number of revisions and additions throughout the text. There will also be an index of people, suggested by a number of readers and colleagues. The book should be released under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial license in April 2024.
Thank you for following me, sharing my Tweets and encouraging me with your comments over the last two decades,
Martin White 2 January 2024