I cringed when I read Kevin Turner's quote ""Enterprise search is our business, it's our house and Google is not going to take that business. Those people are not going to be allowed to take food off of our plate, because that is what they are intending to do." I know what he meant...it just didn't sound right. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, had a similar situation earlier this week. Danny Sullivan got it right, as usual. Basically, Danny says it is not Microsoft or Google's house. Autonomy is the clear leader in enterprise search. If you haven't seen the Kevin Turner quote and interview here is a link to Forbes's story.
My reaction? It is the customer's house, and the customer invites lots of different companies in for a visit. I know Mr. Turner meant that Microsoft's sweet spot is selling software to enterprises, whereas Google's sweet spot is free services for consumers. But Microsoft is not alone in the enterprise. Far from it.
"This is our house" is a catchy soundbite meant to inspire Microsoft employees and partners at the Worldwide Partner Conference, and probably next week at MGB, Microsoft's Global Briefing for field sales people. The comment should be taken for what it is...a "rah rah" speech to get employees and partners excited. Kevin Turner, and the rest of Microsoft, know that no market segment or territory is "owned" by one company. We compete every day in every market segment.
Enterprise search is very different from web search. Google's PageRank algorithm, and other web based search ranking algorithms are of little use in the enterprise. Web search algorithms rely on links, URLs, authority, and popularity to find results and rank them. Enterprise documents, email, and databases don't have links, popularity, etc.
My colleague, Cliff Reeves, wrote a blog about one of our partners, Coveo who does enterprise search. Cliff explains; Enterprise search is not the same as web search.
Hyperlinks are less-used (and so are less valuable in ranking -- which largely defeats Google's value proposition)
Data sources and types are more diverse (they include databases, metadata or properties such as author and date, ERPsystems, and even video) and ranked results must weight accurately results from all these sources
Crawling and indexing techniques need to take account of corporate network management (for example, Google's crawling is often seen by corporate networks as a denial of service attack).
Search must respect the complex security, rights and policies that surround enterprise documents and stores.
Microsoft works with partners to enhance our own enterprise search capabilities. Partners include; BA-Insight, Coveo, Sinequa, and others. Microsoft enterprise search coupled with our partners technology is a powerful combination. Lots of enterprise search customers invite us into their house.
You said, "Google's PageRank algorithm, and other web based search ranking algorithms are of little use in the enterprise."
Does the Google Appliance use the same algorithms as the outward facing site(s)? When indexing unstructured document (types) it occurs to me: there are fewer players today than there will be two years from now; it's early in the dance and a Gartner/Forrester/McKinsey/Boston Consulting Group assessment of the space would have to conclude whoever the leader is today will be doing far better a job of indexing, ranking and policy respect two years from now; and finally that everyone is pretty much lumbering in the same direction.
The cool thing is, when enterprise search is finally done right and is truly "enterprise wide" we'll know it immediately when we see it. Until then I'm not so sure the local searching of file heirarchies has been perfected yet :)
Posted by: Gerald Buckley | July 16, 2006 at 08:50 AM
True dat! it drives me CRAZY when vendors talk this shit.
oracle used to often say "bea is in our back yard and its an ugly place to be blah blah blah"
no its the CUSTOMERS yard.
well said Don.
Posted by: James Governor | July 17, 2006 at 03:57 PM