The Growth of Search 

The office automation application suppliers have until recently paid scant attention to the retrieval of unstructured information, beyond the provision of a simple files and folders capability.  Similarly, organisations have gone from a situation where a good PA, secretary or filing clerk knew where every document should be to a state where an individual is generally responsible for his own unstructured data storage.  The growth of the so called 'desktop search' applications is a response to the growing awareness of the problems of personal unstructured data retrieval.  Enterprise search, typically embedded in the company intranet, was traditionally only present in large, information rich organisations.  However, today enterprise search is increasingly being seen not as a stand alone component in the intranet but rather as an embedded component in Business Intelligence (BI)  Customer Relationship, Human Resource and Enterprise Resource  Management systems.  Indeed both structured and unstructured information manipulation is the 'stuff' that is driving the development and integration of these capabilities.

Today everyone can 'Google' a subject.  Using whatever search engine they favour keyword search returns masses of results, and often too many.  In an internal network this effect can be somewhat less but the 'hits' returned can still be overwhelming.  Ordering, filtering and sorting (by author, date, file type, etc) search results can help but at i-logue we believe that search is still at the 'crawling' stage in its development.  However, search is about to become a 'toddler' and will start to develop rapidly.  Smart search techniques are starting to improve the 'number of hits' issue.  Frequently used searches can be saved, workgroup searches can be aggregated by common need, searches can be context sensitive or the results can be filtered on the fly be content type and relevancy.