Enterprise Search Experts
Kvasir (www.kvasir.no) just released a new version of their search, which they have chosen to call “search 3.0″. This rises expectations high, so let’s investigate how they do…
The old kvasir was one of the most used web searches in Norway, but they never really managed to beat Google in popularity, so far. So what’s new in the new version of their search, and has this anything to do with “search 3.0″? (more…)
As a search specialist I appreciate proper search features, also on the smartphone. For those of us remembering the PalmPilot back in 2000, it had a wonderful global search option, bringing up results from all applications in one screen. Perfect! And now we get this on the iPhone. In iPhone OS 3.0 coming this summer, Spotlight search will be standard. This is implemented as a new search screen to the left of the main screen, which brings up results from all applications in the same result set.
This is just perfect for quickly finding that contact you know lives in Sweden, or that SMS (or was it an email?) you wrote last week. I have always missed the PalmPilot’s powerful search, and now I can’t wait to see it coming to my phone – only 9 years later 
The open source search server Solr from Apache Foundation has become a mature technology ready for prime-time.
The recent editions has added features which previously were only found in commercial offerings, such as
Apache Solr is being adopted more widely, and some companies even start replacing their expensive commercial engine with Solr with good results. In that way they can spend less on licenses and more on content quality and tuning.
Feeling ready to try Solr? Contact us for a talk, or download it yourself and try the tutorial. Here’s a short video introducing you to the basics:
I will soon write about how to obtain professional support for Apache Solr.
The legendary founder of Free Software Foundation (FSF), and initiator of GNU (Gnu is Not Unix), GPL and more, visited Oslo today. I attended his speech about Copyright at the University of Oslo, where a few hundred people were gathered to hear (and see) this strange looking and strange speaking man.
This is indeed one piece of a strange person. When being told that “the floor is yours”, he knelt down on the floor repeating “the floor is mine!”, and later in the show he dressed in black, comparing the Emacs text editor to a religion.
At the end of the lecture, that was indeed the impression I got, that for mr. Stallman, this is indeed all about “religion” and ideology, more than anything else. He is living in his own little ideal, ideological bubble, hoping that all big coroporations will go away and that everyone will be able to copy everything to everyone, and that nobody should be allowed to make money on software licenses.
Stallman’s problem is not that he advocates free software and the benefits of the whole movement, but that he is so completely ignorant of the real world around him – not willing to see that there are other goals in this world than fulfilling his own four degrees of (complete) freedom of use and redistribution when it comes to software (and other works).
Now a few words about the topic of his speech – Copyright. Stallman has designed his own copyright laws which he’d like the world to adopt. Basically what he suggests is a division of copyright into three: A) All software should be free (as in free speech), as should all school textbooks and all encyclopedias and other fact books. B) Works that express someone’s thought or in other ways must be kept as is, should be covered by a limited copyright, say 10 years, and C) works of art should be protected in a limited way – it should be always be allowed to share them with others (copy), and even use fragments of other’s art in your own works.
All this is good – international copyright laws could need a makeover, and limited period of protection. Where I no longer follow is when mr. Stallman talks about copying or “sharing” of e.g. music or movies – he completely lacks respect for legal agreements or law, in encouraging the breaking of such agreements in order to “be kind” and share with your friends. A normal grown-up intellectual human being would not face hundreds of students encouraging such crime, and at the same time demanding to be taken seriously by the record labels, commercial software houses, lawyers and others. Which is unfortunate, because he would be sooo much a better advocat for free and open software if he would not live in his bubble pretending the world was all as he wished. It is ok to encourage people to choose, use and even write free software. But to encourage people to break the law by infringing copyright and license laws, is not the way to go.
Free and Open Source software is a super way to make software. And it can meet the competition fine without turning to legal disobedience, hatred against others etc. Let people choose FREEly what software to use, and spend your time writing excellent Free software which is better than the alternatives, and create an ecosystem of open and closed source which works together to create better and cheaper software for tomorrow!
Attivio
Boston based Attivio (www.attivio.com) is founded by ex-FAST key people with Ali Riaz in the driver’s seat, and promises to bridge the gap between traditional Enterprise Search and traditional Databases/Information Warehouses.
Being less than two years old, the new company is already making headlines, and time (and customers) will reveal how much is pure product strenght and how much is the usual marketing blabla.
Many with DB background miss the ability to do real JOINs with traditional enterprise search engines, where typically DB tables need to be de-normalized and flattened before being indexed. For most use-cases that doesn’t cause a big problem, but for some applications the amount of redundancy in the engine just grows too big, and/or the flexibility of doing varied queries along other axis than the index was designed for, gets complicated or impossible.
The problem has been that a runtime JOIN is very costly – where RDBMS’s can spend minutes or hours computing a huge JOIN query, you expect from an Enterprise Search Engine that the result be ready in milliseconds. So if Oracle have not succeeded in combining unstructured search with large structured queries in an efficient way, how can a small startup do it? Or can they?
We’ll follow-up once the product, called Active Intelligence EngineTM (AIE) has been prooven a bit more in the market.
And IF Attivio’s claims are correct, then both Oracle and Microsoft/FAST really have something to fear, because this is something the information retrieval world have been waiting for a loong time!