Last week I attended Enterprise Search & Discovery 2014, part of the KMWorld conference in Washington DC. I’d been asked to speak on Turning Search Upside Down and luckily had the first slot after the opening keynote: thanks to all who came and for the great feedback (there are slides available to conference attendees, I’ll publish them more widely soon, but this talk was about media monitoring, our Luwak library and how we have successfully replaced Autonomy IDOL and Verity with a powerful open source solution for a Scandinavian monitoring firm).
Since ESSDC is co-located with KMWorld, Sharepoint Symposium and Taxonomy Bootcamp, it feels like a much larger event than the similar Enterprise Search Europe, although total numbers are probably comparable. It was clear to me that the event is far more focused on a business rather than technical audience, with most of the talks being high-level (and some being simply marketing pitches, which was a little disappointing). Mentions of open source search were common (from Dion Hinchcliffe’s use of it as an example of a collaborative community, to Kamran Kahn’s example of Apache Solr being used for very large scale search at the US National Archives). Unfortunately a lot of the presenters started with the ‘search sucks, everyone hates search’ theme (before explaining of course that their own solution would suck less) which I’m personally becoming a little tired of – if we as an industry continue pursuing this negative sentiment we’re unlikely to raise the profile of enterprise search: perhaps we should concentrate on more positive stories as they certainly do exist.
I spent a lot of time networking with other attendees and catching up with some old contacts (a shout out to Miles Kehoe, Eric Pugh, Jeff Fried and Alfresco founder John Newton, great to see you all again). My favourite presentation was Dave Snowden‘s fantastic and very funny debunking of knowledge management myths (complete with stories about London taxi drivers and a dig at American football) and I also enjoyed Raytion‘s realistic case studies (‘no-one is searching for the sake of searching – except us [search integrators] of course’). Presentations I enjoyed somewhat less included Brainspace (who stressed Transparency as a key value, then when I asked if their software was thus open source, explained that they would love it to be so but then they wouldn’t be able to get any investment – has anyone told Elasticsearch?) and Hewlett Packard, who tried to tell us that their new API to the venerable IDOL search engine was ‘free software’ – not by any definition I’m aware of, sorry. Other presentation themes included graph/semantic search – maybe this is finally something we can consider seriously, many years after Tim Berners Lee’s seminal paper.
Thanks to Information Today, Marydee Ojala and all others concerned for organising the event and making me feel so welcome.
