Originally published June 21 2005
Search engine companies compete to optimize web searches
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
CIO's recent article describes the growing competition among search engines to optimize results using enhanced algorithms, user interfaces and other security technologies.
Type the words "soil pollution regulations" into the search box on the state's North Star portal, and you'll find more than 70,000 results, including a seemingly endless stream of outdated government studies, arcane court cases and links to several agency databases.
"We now have the power to build a topic structure, including topics, subtopics and browsable subcategories," says Eileen Quam, information architect for the Minnesota Office of Technology in St. Paul.
For enterprises with rapidly expanding websites and portals, the need to make unstructured information---that is, data that hasn't been formatted, tagged or indexed for fast retrieval---more manageable is undeniable.
"It's a well-known statistic in the search business that 80 percent of corporate data is unstructured versus 20 percent that's contained in databases and ERP systems," says Tammy Alairys, a partner with business and technology consultancy Accenture.
Alairys leads Accenture's information management practice, which provides consulting services on enterprise content management (ECM), business intelligence (BI), and search and collaboration technologies.
Yet, as more enterprises turn to search tools, CIOs are discovering that the technology also comes with strings attached, particularly in the areas of usability and security.
That's why the search engine business is suddenly red hot.
Heightened competition has also encouraged the companies to give away software, such as desktop search tools, in an effort to bring in more customers.
But despite the flurry of activity, Forrester's Ramos believes that the enterprise search market stands at a crossroads, leading to consolidation with either ECM or BI software.
For CIOs, consolidation promises to ease costs and simplify deployment and management by integrating search technology into a larger product.
Web services, in the form of XML, can play a big role in streamlining and improving the accuracy of user searches.
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