In 10 years, federated search—or search of any kind for that matter—won’t exist.

What? Heresy, you say! Let me elaborate. The function of search will exist—but not in a context with which any of us is familiar today. After all, "search" only exists because we don’t have the information we need or want at our fingertips in the first place. As a function, it’s really extraneous to our needs, and it will disappear as a dedicated action because it’s really part of something else.

If this sounds heretical, let’s look at calendar software. Ten years ago, OnTime was the dominant calendar software provider, and Outlook didn’t even exist in the form we know it. Today, the notion of "calendaring" is an integral part of our interconnected, Wi-Fi/web-enabled, mobile-synced environ­ment in ways we could hardly imagine in 1998. In 1998, it was virtually impossible to have a calendar integrated into our email function and seamlessly synced to a hand-held phone in our pocket. In fact, most of us carried separate cell phones and PDAs in 1998—and even those PDAs’ calendars didn’t correlate to our desktops.

So if "search" doesn’t exist in 2018, how will we find the information that we need across vast volumes of informa­tion and disparate silos or datastores? Digitally stored in­formation is increasing—dramatically—and there’s noth­ing to indicate that trend won’t continue. In 2018, there will be more available information than most of us can even imagine. If you were to apply today’s technology to accessing that information it would be akin to trying to heat your house with a hair dryer.  The simple answer is that the companies who will—or might—develop and handle the technologies and infrastructure to accomplish federated search in 2018 probably don't currently exist. So let's look at what the world might look like in 2018. 

Identifying locations of information—long a corporate problem and driving force behind many current readiness initiatives and legal preparedness—will become a market in its own right.   The same way we "outsource"managing our CRM solutions to companies like SalesForce, we will "outsource"the mapping of our data and data sources to trusted entities.   By 2018, storage will be so extensive, inexpensive, and ubiquitous that today’s Records Management (RM) policies will be largely ineffective and—for lack of a better term—dead.  Like it or not, everybody will save everything somewhere, probably in many places. RM will morph into more of a "know where it is and who has it" than tracking the information lifecycle or even worrying about destruction.   The challenges we are wrestling with today in terms of privacy and data piracy will be solved by 2018, so don’t be dissuaded by the "it’s not secure" argument.  The world will change greatly in ten years.

These "data locator" companies (for lack of a better term) will maintain the data maps, understand the data formats, and manage permissions—very important to companies and individuals alike.  They will also manage the indexing of such information—by 2018, there are likely to be some baseline standards, at least, for indices.  These companies will likely differentiate themselves in the type and depth of indices they provide, and we will pay them with ongoing subscription or service feesl ike we do today in corporate and consumer worlds alike.   As content aggregation becomes a larger challenge in Web 2.0 and 3.0 worlds, and as mash-ups become the online "language" of the masses, companies in the content business today—companies like Yahoo! or even Ask—may well become the data management companies of the next decade, either by design or by default.

VYRE has released Unify 4.4, the latest version of its enterprise-class Web platform. This includes the new module, Unify: EnterpriseSearch, which is fully integrated into Unify. VYRE describes Unify as a content management platform designed to automate the digital marketing supply chain.

Its single platform approach provides a range of solution options and unifies the worlds of content management, digital asset management and marketing resource management. The company says Version 4.4 includes more than 300 new features and bug fixes and emphasizes the new capabilities to perform facetted and federated searching across the enterprise. VYRE explains that facetted search provides immediate feedback on the breakdown of search results and allows users to quickly and accurately drill down within search results. Federated search enables users to eradicate content silos by allowing users to search multiple content repositories.

Additional features include: suggested relevant terms, in-context hit highlighting, stemming and ranking.

eTouch announces SamePage Version 4.1, its flagship enterprise wiki platform. Headlining its features are enhanced social media and deployment capabilities.

The company reports the key social media features of SamePage V. 4.1 include:

• an integrated social directory with rich user profiles and people search that facilitates people-centric collaboration;
• user-created profiles to provide a well-rounded view to other users and become a source for a collaborative social directory;
• extensive people-search functionality;
• page ratings;
• Twitter-like status updates;
• display of the most recent wiki activities; and
• on-premise customers can customize the user-profile for their instance, hiding SamePage attributes that may not be relevant within their specific organization.

More information about the social features of SamePage V. 4.1 is available here.

Scitopia.org, a federated search portal created by science and engineering societies, has added alerting service to the site. The service allows researchers to stay up-to-date on articles of interest published in peer-reviewed journals. Scitopia alerts delivers personalized email alerts about content of interest to users on a frequency they specify. Alerts can be created for any term or name, including title or abstract keywords, author names, and author affiliations. Users can also choose to receive alerts from all or selected society publishers, providing a unique multidisciplinary perspective on any research interest.
 
(www.scitopia.org)

Netezza Corporation, a provider of data warehouse and analytic appliances, and Kalido announced a partnership to produce data warehouse solutions in an automated and flexible BI architecture. Under the terms of the partnership, Kalido will release a version of its Kalido Information Engine that will be certified to run on Netezza appliances. As part of the partnership, Netezza and Kalido will collaborate to develop industry-specific solutions to meet business requirements across a number of industries, including life sciences, financial services, and consumer packaged goods. Netezza automates much of the database administration activities, such as hardware configuration and tuning, while Kalido automates much of the development, such as physical schema management, data load, exception management, integrated master data management, and BI configuration.
 
(www.netezza.com, www.kalido.com)

Queplix has debuted QueSearch, a universal search platform that securely integrates structured data from enterprise, SaaS and cloud applications into a single search tool. The company explains QueSearch automatically extracts data and permissions from a wide variety of application and database formats, while enforcing security policies and access controls on a per-user basis to ensure that sensitive data is protected.

Queplix adds QueSearch employs its QueCrawler technology to deliver a high level of automation and integration with top enterprise applications including SAP, Siebel, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Salesforce.com and Microsoft Exchange.

The company emphasizes the following advantages of its new solution:

• Synthetic documents--QueSearch ingests structured data from enterprise and cloud applications, and creates synthetic data objects that can be injected into enterprise search indexes such as Google Search Appliance, Autonomy, Endeca or FAST.
• Near real-time indexing--The software monitors applications in real time to capture updated data and metadata for injection into the search index.
• Dynamic discovery--QueSearch can dynamically discover application data and metadata, such as business entities and relational links, users, roles and permissions, for inclusion in the search index, reducing the need for custom development and taxonomy catalogs.
• Web-based data browsing--Once a user receives authorized search results incorporating structured and unstructured data, QueSearch enables them to view the data within the original application or within a flexible Web data browsing interface.

dtSearch Corp., a supplier of enterprise and developer text retrieval software, announced extensions to its 64-bit developer product line. The new release covers both dtSearch's enterprise and developer products, including native 64-bit versions. For the developer products, the new release provides expanded sample code for use with Microsoft's recent Visual Studio version. For the enterprise products, the new release updates the user interface. The following dtSearch products are all included in the new Version 7.6 release: dtSearch Desktop with Spider, dtSearch Network with Spider, dtSearch Web with Spider, dtSearch Publish, and dtSearch Engine for Win & .NET, and dtSearch Engine for Linux.
 
(www.dtsearch.com)

 Exalead, a software provider in the enterprise and web search markets, developed a computing framework for its web search engine. The computing framework is called DSort. DSort technology distributes a computation over a large number of machines. According to Exalead's blog, Exalead hopes to combine this scalable architecture (DSort) with a level of intelligence and information access functionality.

(www.exalead.com)

Imprezzeo, an image search software company, announced a partnership with Nstein Technologies, Inc., a supplier of digital publishing solutions, including Text Mining, Web Content Management, and Digital Asset Management. Nstein will integrate Imprezzeo's image based search engine with its Text Mining and search products. With this partnership, Imprezzeo offers a software development kit (SDK), access to Imprezzeo developer resources, and technical support. Imprezzeo Image Search uses both content-based image retrieval (CBIR) and facial recognition (FR), allowing customers to use images to search for images, rather than textual search terms. The technology generates image search results that match a sample image either chosen by the user from an initial set of search results that can then be refined, or from an image uploaded by the user
 
(www.imprezzeo.com, www.nstein.com)

The French company Relaxnews has selected software from Nstein to launch a worldwide information system for leisure activities. The company is deploying Nstein’s Web content management (WCM) and text mining engine (TME) solutions.

In a partnership with the Agence France Presse, Relaxnews is initiating the international network under the "Relaxnews" banner. The company already operates a leisure activity newswire in France called "Relaxfil."

"We were looking for an open, flexible platform that would allow us to support an approach focused on the user and the community," says Mathieu Bully, technical director at Relaxnews. "Nstein’s WCM platform will give us this flexibility, as well as offering automatic semantic tagging of the content, which will be key to optimizing the experience of our users and the relevance of the proposed content. Text mining will also play an important part in classifying information accurately, and this way simplify the export and syndication of our content."

By relying on WCM’s open source approach and by using the business features included in the product version, Relaxnews was able to handle the system in house. The solution delivers innovative content and an enhanced user experience, Nstein reports in a recent press release. Text mining capabilities allow intelligent management of the content, the company adds.

We all know of the imperative of managing the extreme—and sometimes debilitating—volume of data in today's organizations. In early March, Digital Reef emerged from two years of stealth mode to tackle this problem by introducing what it claims is a new approach to discover and manage unstructured and semi-structured data.

The company says its massively scalable platform is designed to address critical business issues—such as e-discovery, data risk mitigation, knowledge reuse and strategic storage initiatives—that aren't currently properly addressed using traditional solutions. Digital Reef says that as the volume of data expands unchecked, enterprises take on more expense and more risk.

"In the sea of solutions focusing on e-discovery and enterprise search, Digital Reef uniquely understands the requirements of data center infrastructure and contextual content management," says Tony Asaro, founder and senior consultant of The INI Group. "This combination sets Digital Reef apart from other players. From a data center perspective, Digital Reef's solution uses grid architecture to meet the performance requirements for indexing massive amounts of data.

"[Digital Reef] has a truly federated view of all of the data regardless of physical location, and the solution transparently works with all file systems from NTFS to WAFL to ZFS. From a content management perspective, Digital Reef combines intelligent keyword search with its unique similarity engine to enable users to efficiently access the appropriate and relevant information they seek."

Digital Reef says its namesake platform allows customers to:

• locate specific kinds of data, including sensitive data like Social Security and credit card numbers,
• identify regulated data for compliance,
• pinpoint relevant documents for pending legal action, and
• find intellectual property that can be reused for competitive advantage.

Concept Searching announced that Version 4 of its product, conceptClassifier for SharePoint, is now available. Features include a new installer that enables installation in a SharePoint environment, requires no programmatic support, and functionality that can be turned on or off using standard Microsoft SharePoint controls. Included in the new release is the ability to assign taxonomies to specific Content Types. Documents that correspond to the selected Content Types will be classified and documents that do not correspond to a content type or do not include some metadata elements that a specific content type has specified will not be classified. The taxonomies will be available for these documents regardless of their location.

(www.conceptsearching.com)

dtSearch has released extensions to its 64-bit developer product line that cover both its enterprise and developer products, including native 64-bit versions. For the developer products, the new release provides expanded sample code for use with Microsoft's most recent Visual Studio version. For the enterprise products, the new release updates the user interface, providing a greater selection of "look and feel" options for users.

The following dtSearch products are all included in the new Version 7.6 release:

• dtSearch Desktop with Spider and dtSearch Network with Spider: The network edition searches across a network and both instantly search and display, with highlighted hits, a wide variety of file types, including e-mail messages along with the full text of e-mail attachments. Through the Spider, both applications can also add Web content to a local or network search.
• dtSearch Web with Spider quickly publishes a large volume of instantly searchable data to an IIS Internet or intranet site. dtSearch Web works as a "point and click" solution, with no programming required. The Spider provides integrated support for local and remote Web site data.
• dtSearch Publish enables users to easily publish instantly searchable document collections or Web site content to portable media (CDs, DVDs, external hard drives, etc.).

We are now accepting proposals to speak at Enterprise Search Summit West 2009, which will be held November 17-19 in San Jose, CA. . The deadline for submitting proposals is April 29, 2009. Search can no longer be viewed as a stand-alone application; it is increasingly part of everything we do and has become the de facto gateway to information in the enterprise. This year’s Summit will examine the ways to leverage search tools, information architecture, classification, and other strategies and technologies to enable information access. We seek dynamic speakers who can talk knowledgeably about detailed aspects of how to implement and maximize search within an organization.

Click here to submit a proposal.