January 22, 2007

41 differences between web and enterprise search

Based on a patent application, SEOmoz has discerned 65 aspects of the Google ranking algorithm.* I counted only 24 that really had much at all to do with enterprise search. This leaves 41 or so focused on spam/SEO-fighting and/or on-page linking issues that have no enterprise parallel. And for more depth, here’s a long article from another SEO site, on a specific phrase-concurrence spam-fighting technique that has no apparent applicability to trusted corpuses.
*I highly recommend this link. It is by far the best single-page overview of web search algorithmic issues I’ve ever seen.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating — web search and enterprise search (or search of a constrained corpus) are very different technical problems.

Comments

5 Responses to “41 differences between web and enterprise search”

  1. Text Technologies»Blog Archive » A great new (to me) phrase – “Adversarial Information Retrieval” on January 30th, 2007 10:40 am

    […] I think this area is really where the bulk of the research into public search engine algorithm goes. And that’s another way of saying that web and enterprise search are very different things. • • • […]

  2. googfan on February 8th, 2007 12:23 pm

    I think the folks at Google would agree with you that they are in fact very different things. Also, there are a number of things that Google does that are not patented for obvious reasons. It would seem that you are suggesting that Google doesn’t understand enterprise search. If thats the case, why did they go and grab about 40% market share in the space and cause everyone else (Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle) to replicate their work?

  3. Curt Monash on February 9th, 2007 1:54 am

    “Everyone else” in enterprise search starts with Autonomy and FAST in some order, I would say, not Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle.

    Understanding enterprise search better than Microsoft, for example, is not a great accomplishment.

  4. » Posted on CMS Watch - Blogosphere responds to Google’s appliance upgrade - My Webmaster News Blog on February 9th, 2007 3:24 pm

    […] Google’s vaunted patents revolve mostly around public web search… […]

  5. The Monash Report»Blog Archive » Three ways to market analytics-related technology on March 19th, 2007 4:58 am

    […] Web search and generic enterprise search aren’t the only search areas to focus on information access. (And yes, they’re most definitely separate areas.) Even customer-facing structured search does; the information is just tailored according to different criteria. […]

Leave a Reply




Feed including blog about text analytics, text mining, and text search Subscribe to the Monash Research feed via RSS or email:

Login

Search our blogs and white papers

Monash Research blogs

User consulting

Building a short list? Refining your strategic plan? We can help.

Vendor advisory

We tell vendors what's happening -- and, more important, what they should do about it.

Monash Research highlights

Learn about white papers, webcasts, and blog highlights, by RSS or email.