In the spirit of the New Year, I hereby predict that we have begun the third year of the “Year of Enterprise Search” which, due to the tremendous rate of innovation, will only last a total of five. We are now at the stage where search platforms include all the building blocks to create a truly user-friendly and effective search experience. In years four and five, the distinction between desktop and enterprise search will blur, and the need to understand concepts such as protocol handlers, incremental or full crawls, keywords or Boolean search expressions will decrease significantly. By that time, our enterprise search engines will “know” how to search content of virtually any type, whether local to my computer, on my firm’s servers or on the other side of the globe.
This being year three, however, we still have some work to do to make search easy and intuitive for our end-users.
