Search

The economic climate is undergoing change. Shifts in the technical ecosystem can cause migrations and invasions of flora and fauna. At the same time, the economic climate is creating some opportunities. In fact, ELK are on the move. These ELK are not the wapiti, one of the largest of the deer (Cervidae) species. Mammalogists will tell you that elk and moose are often confused, since the animals are known by different names in North America and Europe. The ELKs I discuss in this article, however, have no geographical boundaries. They are organizations, both commercial and not-for-profit, that provide a hospitable environment for Elasticsearch and its information retrieval system, its Logstash, and its Kibana technologies., ELK is an acronym for the open source search and analytics stack offered by Elasticsearch (elasticsearch.com). ELK is 'a stack that delivers actionable insights in real time,' says Elasticsearch. The [...]

During the last 3 decades, companies continually have proclaimed their search innovations. In the lengthy annex to A History of Online Information Services, 1963-1976 (MIT Press, 2003, 496 pp.), Charles [...]

Years ago I stumbled upon the poem 'Siren Song' (poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/21988) by Margaret Atwood. It begins: This is the one song everyone would like to learn: the song that is irresistible [...]

The Evergreen Project (evergreen-ils.org), created in 2006 by the Georgia Public Library System, has been a touchstone for the benefits of open source software for libraries and is now widely [...]

Cloud computing plays an increasingly larger role in the information technology activities of many organizations, not just libraries. But most cloud solutions run on proprietary hardware that can be expensive [...]

OPEN SOURCE is now seen as a safe choice for large organizations; it's not merely relegated to implementations by small, cash-strapped companies, universities, and libraries. Many well-known organizations rely on [...]

Many people are making a big fuss about openness. The word 'open' has been stretched beyond covering software. Open source, it seems, can be applied in a number of areas [...]

The rich and famous American football player 'Neon' Deion Sanders allegedly said, 'Sure we're in limos. We're stars. How else is a star supposed to travel?' Good question. It's one [...]

Do not doubt that eBay (www.ebay.com) is in the information business. Its sprawling ecommerce listings perch on top of petabytes of data and use state-of-the-art infrastructure to handle millions of [...]

Shortly after the publication of my report, 'The New Landscape of Enterprise Search: A Critical Review of the Market and Search Systems' (www.pandia.com/ enterprise-search) in June 2011, a prominent vendor [...]

There's an idiom you've probably encountered: 'A wolf in sheep's clothing.' According to The Phrase Finder (www.phrases.org.uk), this means, 'Someone who hides malicious intent under the guise of kindliness.' It's [...]

Ovum, a unit of the Datamonitor Group, put its cards on the table back in January 2011 when it declared open source search ready for the enterprise in a report [...]

In 1999, I wrote 'The TV-Web-Net Appliance: All in the Family Room?' for Searcher magazine (vol. 7, no. 9, October 1999, pp. 34-38). I made three big mistakes in that [...]

The TV landscape is a whale of a 'wasteland.' bigger than former FCC cxar Newton Minnow ever imagined, broad-cast-quality video is ubiquitous. Changing the installed base of traditional television receivers [...]

I was struck by the text-centric nature of the presentations at the Content Management Strategies Conference in April in Chicago. An interesting talk addressed the challenge of document versions in [...]

'Big data without governance will quickly become a big problem,' says Christophe Toum, the data governance manager at Talend (talend.com) in an interview with Anmol Rajpurohit in KDNuggets (kdnuggets.com/2014/08/ interview-christophe-toum-talenddata-governance.html). [...]

Have organizations become the business process equivalent of peer-to-peer computing? Enterprise software applications have for more than 50 years meshed with what I call traditional organizational structure. Employees went to [...]

E-mail, once again, dominated headlines in early March 2015. E-mail, one can argue, is the killer app for the network-connected professional over the age of 40. Younger Gen Xers, the [...]

General Electric (ge.com) has a software startup. The somewhat surprising development is the subject of the Harvard Business Review essay, 'Building a Software Start-Up Inside GE,' by Brad Power (https [...]

We talk about an ocean of information. The more poetical describe a tsunami of data. The marketers--ever clever--explain that their systems will keep you 'from drowning in data.' Language fails […]

In 2000, the U.S. federal government began work on a program to allow citizens to search for information on thousands of Web servers operated by government agencies. Estimated first-year costs [...]

Ask LexisNexis, Factiva, Dialog, EBSCOhost, or ProQuest to return information on, say, Mace donian weapons, and that's what you get. An exact match on the terms entered to describe the [...]

In 2004, Google 'won' the Web search race--in terms of media coverage, investor excitement, and coining the new verb google, as in, 'Google it again, Sam.' However, though Web searching […]

Enterprise search represents a new opportunity for information professionals. Long accustomed to searching traditional online services and Web databases for external information, we are now turning our attention to internal [...]

Electronic books have not grabbed mystery and romance readers by their palpitating hearts. Toting an e-book to the beauty shop of using a tablet PC slumped on the sofa lack […]

Search is a problem. Or perhaps we should rephrase the sentiment as, 'Search remains a challenging human-computer issue.' Listen to one MBA'S comment about the Louisville Free Public Library's online […]

Content management touches virtually every aspect of an organization. The shift from proprietary network architectures to the Internet means that text, PowerPoint presentations, customer support records, and audio-visual data have [...]

Employees possess information that others know about. A sales manager may summarize a competitor's prices at a weekly business strategy meeting. Other information may emerge from employee actions. Tacit Software, [...]

On a trip to the United Kingdom, I visited the Science Museum (science museum.org.uk), and saw an Aveling & Porter steamroller built in the 1870s. Amy, as the large machine [...]

Cloud computing and big data appear to be a new technology marriage made in heaven. For many organizations, the cloud and big data could crack the knowledge management problem. In [...]

I learned a new word, 'twerk.' I ran a query on Google (google.com) and saw a list of results and a film strip of images pointing to a pop singer's [...]

I was unfamiliar with ConceptNet 4, crafted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, mit.edu), until I saw a news story, 'Top Artificial Intelligence System Is as Smart as a [...]

France continues to incubate search, content processing and analytics innovations. Exalead (3ds. com/products-services/exalead), founded by a member of the Alta Vista search team, challenged Google (google.com) with 64-bit architecture in [...]

Bookstores -- especially locally-owned and small bookstores -- reacted vociferously this summer to the strategic relationship formed between The New York Times and Barnes & Noble, the Wal*Mart of mega-bookstores […]

Albert Einstein allegedly quipped, 'Don't worry about your difficulties in mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.' Perhaps, Einstein was tapping into what may have been one of [...]

My team and I were reviewing our search archive files to update our information about desktop search systems. The unexpected news was about high-profile consulting companies proclaiming the death of [...]

IN the last issue of Online Searcher, I considered the tension between open source and what I called the 'walled garden approach' to information ('Promises of Walled Gardens and FOSS,' [...]

In the course of research into the sentiment analysis sector, I learned about Semantria (semantria.com). Founded in 2011, the company is a joint venture between Lexalytics (lexalytics.com) and the software [...]

Oracle (oracle.com) is one of the world's leading enterprise software vendors. Its data management system is ubiquitous in organizations worldwide. Its acquisition of InQuira, RightNow and Endeca, all in 2011, [...]