Is High-end Search Dead?

For years, companies have maintained large staffs of library science professionals to handle the tough job of high-end search. To find exactly what a finance or research department needed to understand, these trained search specialists would sift through thousands of publications, government reports, and scientific journals to discover all there was to know on a particular subject.

The current crop of leading search technologies have made great strides in usability, and most provide Enterprise Search 2.0 capabilities like entity extraction and dynamic spelling suggestions. Still, for the applications that require fine control over search, fewer and fewer of the leaders in enterprise search are expanding their capabilities.

What kinds of applications require such heavy duty control? The first that come to mind include law firms and eDiscovery applications, as well as corporate research in pharmaceutical and financial services companies. Less often considered are critical information gathering in governments and the intelligence community who need to search through millions of very short messages to find one critical snippet of content. In many of these types of applications, failure to find that bit of data can mean the difference between success and failure, life and death.

What can you do about it?

If you have the kinds of needs that require high-end enterprise and customer facing search, all is not lost. Search technologies exist that can combine the powerful Enterprise Search 2.0 capabilities that end users want along with the power to create and execute highly precise queries. Give us a call!