Enterprise Search

Chapter 11. A Future for Search

Writing about the future of search is a challenge because the very rapid pace of technical development could make sections of this chapter look very dated by the time the book is published. My objective in doing so is to illustrate that after a long period of benign neglect it would seem that there is a renaissance in enterprise search. The consensus view is that the rate of growth of enterprise information and data is now so high that action now has to be taken to ensure that the organization can benefit from this information. As the adoption of enterprise search accelerates search vendors will feel more comfortable investing in research and development to bring new functionality to the market.

This chapter summarizes some of the areas in which evidence of this investment will be most evident. In a period of rapid change it is even more important than it has been in the past to have a search strategy that is grounded in business reality and user requirements so that these developments can be assessed in terms of the possible impact they could have on business performance.

1. The Petabyte Challenge

In 2011 McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) published a report on Big Data which indicated that that enterprises around the world used more than 7 exabytes of incremental disk drive data storage capacity in 2010; nearly 80 percent of that total appeared to duplicate data that had been stored elsewhere. MGI also analyzed data generation and storage at the level ...