Next generation search platforms: How vendors are searching unstructured content

A ll of us are very familiar with search – it's Google, and it's ubiquitous. Google has done a very good job at monetizing search for the masses. The company incorporates elements of many different technologies, both Boolean and conceptual; it leverages these technologies to quickly mine content; and it presents results in a very familiar, comfortable, non-threatening way. Google has even extended its platform into the enterprise search market, and Google One-Box has a commanding market share. What is very important is to separate Google the business from Google the software. As a business, Google is an advertising company – plain and simple. It is not unlike the early TV broadcasting companies, when 1950s era soap operas were just that – engrossing melodramas written for housebound homemakers, sponsored by laundry detergent manufacturers, with the sole purpose of promoting more soap. This business model works very well for the masses. Rail as we might that Google doesn't provide unbiased answers, that Google searches only present a small snippet of all the information that's out on the web, or that Google seems to be promoting one company over another, without advertising revenues there would be no possible way a company could – or would – invest the hundreds of millions of dollars Google has spent to develop and deploy its search. The model works somewhat for business-to-consumer marketers. The Google search paradigm (its uncluttered keyword search window) is copied by most websites, and the Google advertising paradigm (presenting relevant advertisers within or as part of the results) can be seen on most consumer information sites such as maps and news services. But it doesn't work well for businesses. Even One-Box adopters struggle with the " fixed parameters " that drive Google. In business, there is no advertising revenue for search: It is a means to an end, a necessity to find critical business information and to act upon it. Therefore, over 100 companies – a number that continues to grow rather than shrink – provide some type of search software to a variety of business customers. These companies exist because they are pioneering technologies that focus on searching unstructured information, which is the bulk of what we store and capture today. Searching structured data like spreadsheets and databases is fairly mature. The same holds true for keyword or Boolean search – by themselves, these mark-and-index solutions are widely deployed, and some …