I remember lying on those qualification forms to qualify for the subscriptions.

I’m still waiting for the holographic storage promised by Macweek

On public sites, the new big thing is faceted metadata search and browse, exposing database or metadata attributes in a usable way. Prof. Marti Hearst of UC Berkeley has done the research to show how it is successful in both Information Retrieval and User Experience — http://flamenco.berkeley.edu.

On intranets, there is so little of the traditional research and so many simple navigational questions –, timesheets, software downloads, holiday schedules, etc. Installing a giant KM system is overkill — save that for specific areas of research. On the other hand, because there’s so much more known about the internal, you want to have control over the indexing and relevance ranking, it shouldn’t just be a black box. Link and authority ranking doesn’t work as well as the WWW, because there is so little meaningful hypertext on intranets — most links are just navigation, not recommendations.

You (and Danny Sullivan) say “yawn”, but I’m a librarian and I think enterprise search is incredibly interesting.

I suppose this validates your points: higher-quality content and metadata beget higher-level tools.

The greatest common factor of web content is the hyperlink (which no-one before Google really realized, or took advantage of). And that’s why your other point, that page rank is not optimal for enterprise search, is right on. No matter how heterogenous your document set, no matter how sloppy your content creation workflow or haphazard your categorization, chances are, when your content is all created internally, you’re going to be able to extract more meaningful metadata from your content than what the Google appliance can derive from its hyperlinks (which, in an enterprise context, can’t reasonably be considered a “vote”).

I recently worked on a project evaluating enterprise search options for my company. The Google appliance made the list only for its CYA factor: we could easily convince internal critics that we’d bought a good search engine, because it was Google.

Google doesn’t seem to have a particularly good offering in this area. It looks more like a one-size-fits-all branding approach than a deeply thought out solution.

Some of the gaps in their feature set (based on reading their sales literature; I may be wrong about some points):

Crawl: Content must be on http servers. Back when I had a job, most content was on SMB shares, and I would think a crawler for those could be devised. Likewise, a shared dropbox directory for submissions seems more sensible for users than httpd.

Index: A static index based on periodic crawls. You can’t edit your document, push “save”, and expect to see the changes in the index. The index parses only a fixed set of file types.

Search: Based on, guess what, pagerank. There is some doubt as to whether this is the best ranking algorithm for intranets. No integration with other data sources, eg an ODBC driver.

To address these issues, the ultimate solution is going to look more like a network filesystem with a dynamic index than this device. The door is, for better or worse, open for Microsoft to move into this area.