Another way to follow enterprise search - Twitter!

New and information on search technology seems to come and go in bursts, and sometimes it’s difficult to know where to look. We’ve been providing regular news and event updates on our blog for a few years now, as well as here in enterprise Search. Recently we’ve added a new channel for you to consider: Twitter.

What we’ve done with SearchDev on Twitter is “follow” people well known and respected in the industry whose tweets are on-topic for search: think of it as a aggregation  of current events and current thinking in the enterprise search space. Some of the people we know on Twitter who would be ideal to follow post too much ‘off topic noise” for SearchDev to follow; and some who we’d like to follow are not on Twitter – yet.

Now, before you decide that Twitter is for kids, you might have a look. Sure, 90% of the postings come from 10% of the people; and perhaps the majority of the various Twitter tweets are personal and less-than-valuable, there are some gems hidden in the noise.

If you’ve never used twitter and want to learn what you need to know in less than 15 minutes, check out these ten very brief video Twitter lessons.  If you’re viewing from your office, bring your headset – each of the videos combines video with audio. There is a link to watch all ten of the videos in one sitting, presumably with only one advertisement at the beginning, rather than an ad (the same one!) at the beginning of each lesson.

Come on – follow us on Twitter!

ESS West Tools Workshop: NIE Presenting Search Workshop

Miles Kehoe of New Idea Engineering will be presenting a pre-conference workshop (W19) on Monday, November 19, just before Enterprise Search Summit West starts in San Jose, California. While you can register for just the pre-conference workshops, we’d suggest you consider taking in the entire show.  Harvard’s Andrew McAfee will be giving the keynote, and the conference will have some excellent presentations. Admission to the conference also lets you roam the exhibit floors of ESS, KM World, and Streaming Media all in the San Jose Convention Center.

We’re also working on a cool SearchDev event we’re hoping will get you excited when you’re in the San Jose area. Stay tuned!

SharePoint 2010 Conference

With Microsoft planning a release of FAST ESP re-written for use in SharePoint 2010, you might consider the  SharePoint Conference 2009 for the first big public technical introduction of SharePoint 2010.This will be the first reaslly big 'coing out party' for the soon-to-be-released version!

The conference features additional deep dive classes on the Friday at that week, which are extra cost options but look promising for those who will need to upgrade or evaluate SharePoint 2010. While the web site doesn’t have a lot of detail yet, last year's SharePoint 2008 site gives you an idea of the kind of material that you can expect – plus FAST.

The one caveat: Hurry up! Apparently this show typically oversells well before the show itself, and you don’t want to wish you could have made it. 

Online Live Training for Solr Announced

Lucid Imagination, the folks who want to be the “Red Hat of Search”, have announced onlne training classes for Solr and Lucene. Here at NIE, we've done a number of Lucene and Solr projects over the years, and these and other open source tools are getting to be pretty darn good search solutions. Some packaging issues remain, but they will be a challange the commercial vendors need to address.

As we’ve blogged, Lucene and Solr are popping everywhere in corporations across America, with or without the blessing of Corporate IT.  This training class is one way to at least know what the rebels in your company are doing, so when you have to support it, you’ll know what you’re talking about!

Federation and Clustering Demo Sites from Deep Web Technologies

Abe and Sol Lederman and their folks have put together some great demos of federated search combined with real-time facets/clustering. 

While we believe all of the demo content sources are public and have no security, great federation can handle corporate sites just as well as public sites, and Deep Web’s demos are impressive. What we really like about the site, though, is the high-quality dynamic clustering presented as facets, based on technology from the open source group Carrot^2.  By the way, check out the cartot^2  web site to see some demos as well, including image clustering!

Grokker on the Market?

Rumor is that the federated search and results visualization company Grokker is actively pursuing an acquisition with another company in the space. Their technology, quite cool and leading edge in the early days, has not managed to keep up with ‘enterprise 2.0’ tag clouds, document visualization and other advances, but it’s a solid technology and great people. Let’s hope if they are looking for a merger that they find a friendly partners.