Professional Microsoft® Search: FAST Search, SharePoint® Search, and Search Server

Chapter 12. The Future of Search

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Working with a flawed business model

• Examining trends in Enterprise Search

• Looking at future directions of search

• Learning what you can do today

Now that you've had a chance to look at the exciting new search technologies from Microsoft and learned how to use them to best advantage, let's take some time as we close to look at where we've been in search, where we are now, and where we are going. As Yogi Berra said, "prediction is very hard, especially about the future." That said, let's get started.

THE SORRY STATE OF SEARCH

Search has been used in enterprises for more than 30 years. In the earliest days, simple keyword search offered power that was previously unheard of, and it seemed like living in the future. As the volume of digital data increased, search technology evolved to include a number of statistical algorithms and more advanced linguistics and taxonomies to deliver even better results.

The problem is that organizational digital assets continued to grow to the point that many companies and agencies now have more digital content than was available on the entire Internet in 1995. As this mass of digital content grows, it has become increasingly difficult to imagine how clever algorithms alone can deliver the high-quality results users have come to expect. Where do we go from here?

The Flawed HAL9000 Usage Model

"Find me the proposal I sent to NASA last month, HAL."

"I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."

In 1968, science ...