Thursday, August 03, 2006

Google Can't go it alone in Enterprise Search

On the Internet Google is synonymous with search. It is far and away the number one search site on the Internet. Google also produces a search appliance for enterprises. This device, when installed on your internal network will crawl through your network discovering information you never knew you had. Internal search problems solved you would think? I'm not so sure. Google's search on the Internet uses their Page Rank algorithms that increase the accuracy of your search results by identifying the popularity of a page based on the links to it. This brings me to the issue I am battling with. In the traditional large enterprise. There is typically a very strong control over the corporate intranet and enterprise applications. This translates in to a limited number of people who are responsible for, and have the abilities to create linkages to pages on the corporate intranet. In my mind this limits the effectiveness of Google's technology. Now there are a lot of incredibly bright people at Google - I know I have met some of them. I am sure the enterprise search teams are working to neutralize this problem. I believe that this situation can be solved if Google encourages organizations to adopt Web 2.0 tools to increase the number of linkages that they can trawl in their search. Hence my assertion that Google can't go it alone in Enterprise Search and partnerships with Enterprise Software vendors and Business Intelligence tool providers is not sufficient to solve their challenge. Google needs to encourage the application of mass intellect within the enterprise in order for their search tools to become more valuable inside the Enterprise.

No comments:

Post a Comment