How not to predict the future of search -

I’ve just seen an article titled Enterprise Search: 14 Industry Experts Predict the Future of Search which presents a list of somewhat contradictory opinions. I’m afraid I have some serious issues with the experts chosen and the undeniably blinkered views some of them have presented.

Firstly, if you’re going to ask a set of experts to write about Enterprise Search, don’t choose an expert in SEO as part of your list. SEO is not Enterprise Search, in fact a lot of the time it isn’t anything at all (except snake oil) – it’s a way of attempting to game the algorithms of web search engines. Secondly, at least make some attempt to prevent your experts from just listing the capabilities of their own companies in their answers: in fact one ‘expert’ was actually a set of PR-friendly answers from a company rather than a person, including listing articles about their own software. The expert from Microsoft rather predictably failed to notice the impact of open source on the search market, before going on to put a positive spin on the raft of acquisitions of search companies over the last few years (and it’s certainly not all good, as a recent writedown has proved). Apparently the acquisition of specialist search companies by corporate behemoths will drive innovation – that is, unless that specialist knowledge vanishes into the behemoth’s Big Data strategy, never to be seen again. Woe betide the past customers that have to get used to a brand new pricing, availability and support plan as well.

Luckily it wasn’t all bad – there were some sensible viewpoints on the need for better interaction with the user, the rise of semantic analysis and how the rise of open source is driving out inefficiency in the market – but the article is absolutely peppered with buzzwords (Big Data being the most prevalent, of course) and contains some odd cliches: “I think a generation of people believes the computer should respond like HAL 9000″…didn’t HAL 9000 kill most of the crew and attempt to lock the survivor outside the airlock?

I’m pretty sure this isn’t a feature we want to replicate in an Enterprise Search system.