The speakers were both there to talk about their recent books: prolific author Martin White of Intranet Focus has written a book on Enterprise Search with the strapline ‘Enhancing Business Performance’. Martin has decades of experience in the sector, an enviable collection of war stories from inside the enterprise and was as ever an engaging speaker.

Next up were Tony Russell-Rose and Tyler Tate to talk about their new book which focuses on the user experience of search. ‘Designing the Search Experience’ promises to be a rich resource on how, why and where people use search and how this impacts the design of user interfaces.

The evening ended with some lively discussion and a promise that after its long absence this Meetup will now be happening on a more regular basis. We’re also running our own Cambridge search meetup – the next event is on February 21st where we’ll be hearing about web crawling and scraping. Another date for your diary is the Enterprise Search Europe conference on May 15th & 16th this year – the programme has just been published and features speakers from Ernst & Young and Oracle. I’ll also be running a workshop the day before the conference on Getting the Best from Open Source Search.

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Enter a company without any history or experience in the search market, Huddle, with a tired message about the death of Enterprise Search. I’m not entirely sure what the point of this article is, but apparently the lack of contextual information is the problem – “You have to do research in 50 places — email, Web, C-drives, the cloud, even inside people’s heads.”. I look forward to a brain-compatible indexing tool! There’s also the misassumption that what works for the wider consumer-focused Web will work for the enterprise – Amazon.com, Google and the iPad/iPhone are all namechecked. Enterprise data simply isn’t like web or consumer data – it’s characterised by rarity and unconnectedness rather than popularity and context.

Unfortunately in most enterprises simply sprinkling on social or collaborative features will not fix the most common search problems: a mishmash of unconnected legacy systems, unreliable and inconsistent metadata, a complex and untested security model (at least within the context of being able to search for everything, for example your bosses’ salary) and usually the lack of a dedicated team responsible for search. Enterprise Search is hard and few projects get beyond basic indexing of filestores and databases, let along adding in more people-focused features.

I couldn’t find much about search on Huddle’s website, but what I did find implied that information must first be extracted from existing legacy systems and stored centrally. If you can manage this, preserving a consistent metadata model, coping with legacy formats, preserving full security and coping with updates then search should be relatively simple to implement on the resulting central store; however the devil is as ever in the detail.

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