Bjørn Olstad: Microsoft’s vision for enterprise search

Search as a transparent and ubiquitous layer providing information and context seamlessly – from a search box (tell me what you want in 1.4 words and I will answer) to a conversational interface (giving pointers to more information and suggestions for continued searches, to a natural interface.

Demo of Microsoft Surface: Camera interface, can recognize things. Multiuser (as opposed to Apple. Showed an application built on search with touch – whenever you touch an information object a query goes towards an ESP implementation and brings up all the information available on that object.

Very impressive demo of Excel Gemini: How do you fit enterprise data into Excel. (Picture of a VW bug with a jet engine.) Pulls 100 million rows into Excel, sort them (instantly), slices and dices. Built on top of ESP, does extreme compression, takes advantage of high memory, allows publishing of live spreadsheets to Sharepoint. Extremely impressive, worth the whole conference.

Bjørn continues talking about search as a platform: Demoing Globrix.com, where you can ask questions about apartments and houses and get a rich search experience where you can change attributes and the data changes dynamically. Globrix does not hold content themselves, but crawls available content on the web and shows it (much like Kayak.com for airline tickets).

Another demo: Search for entertainment based on location, friends and content. Moving from there to a focused movie site. This is federated search that understands some of the semantics (understands that “David Bowie” refers to a person and therefore only search certain databases.) Also incorporates community (letting users edit the results and feed them back).

FAST AdMomentum – advertising network – has had tremendous growth.

Content analytics: How can you lay a foundation for a good search experience by focusing on data quality? Demo: Content Integration Studio, sucking out semantics from unstructured text and writing it back both to the search engine and to databases (such as an HR database).

Panel session on enterprise search

Hitachi consulting (Ellen): Very big focus on the economy now, almost all conversations are about that topic. eDiscovery is important: Looking at many sources with a view towards risk discovery and risk mitigation.

EMC consulting (Mark Stone): Natural interfaces will be important, frees up the mind to focus on the information rather than the interface. Shows a video of a small girls using the Surface table and how she very quickly starts to focus on the pictures she is manipulating rather than the interface – she completely forgets that she is working with a computer.

Sue Feldman, IDC: We have to get beyond the document paradigm. I want to see interfaces that will immerse me in the sea of information and explore it, without having to think about what application it is in.

Sue Feldman: Core issue with search: Data quality and making it a rich experience for the user. Anthropological, linguistic and cultural issues, getting people to understand both what they are seeing and what they are looking for.  We are just beginning on this journey. From keyword matching and relevance ranking to pulling the user in, having a dialogue with the information. What we are seeing is hybrid systems that combine collaboration, search, analysis etc.

AMR Research: There is a religious war going on, between collaborative systems, portals, content management systems, and search. They all claim to be the answer to the problem of connecting users with their data. There is also consolidation in the market, partially driven by the economy, but there is also a consolidation of functionality and an explosion in new ideas, many small companies coming up with new ideas.  No one technology is going to solve all of these problems. Lots of opportunity because Microsoft is gobbling up all these technologies, trying to provide one product that covers most (Sharepoint).

Q: Examples of interaction management?

Hitachi consulting: Best examples currently found in collaboration and community software.

EMC: There is a tool out there that searches not only blogs, but specifically the comment sections of blogs, looking for mentions of products. Do sentiment analysis, find out what the customers are saying about you.

Sue Feldman: Searching through corporate communications in lawsuit situations. Ad targeting. And what is the relationship between search and innovation?

Hitachi: Innovation comes from finding what you did not expect to find.

Q: This question always comes up: Search is a commodity – or is it? What is the current market doing for search adoption?

AMR: I am not sure who says that, there is so much room for innovation, so I can’t understand why anyone would say it is commoditized. Go out there and find the opportunities.

Sue F: Well, search is a tool, like a screwdriver. But I really need a screwdriver. The toolbox has expanded so much. I see the search market continuing to explode even though the technology is tanking. Possible that we will see a disruption with a new platform based on information management, access and collaboration.

EMC: We are seeing growth, the business will mature because companies have to focus on what the business really needs.

Sue Feldman & others: Search use awards

Customer awards:

• Best productivity advancement: Verizon Business.
• Best digital market application (I): McGraw-Hill Platts (doing industry-specific searches, 50% increase in trial subscriptions, 40% increase in revenue.)
• Best digital market application (II): SPH Search (reader interaction and content integrated with newspaper sources, federated search.)
• Social computing: Accenture (internal search on people profiles and content)
• User engagement: Kakaku.com, Japan (700m pageviews, 18m unique users)
• User engagement: AutoTrader (peak query level of 1500 qps)

Partner awards:

• Digital market solution: Comperio (use of search for user interaction)
• Social computing solution: NewsGator (enterprise social computing on top of Sharepoint)
• User experience solutions: EMC Consulting
• Partner of the year: Hitachi consulting.