Category: IO Impotency

Open Source Business Intelligence Tools: A Narrow View

Last week, a person with considerable experience in business intelligence told me that interest in open source software applicable to intelligence purposes was evident in South America. I poked around and came across “5 Open Source business intelligence Tools.” I was hoping to learn about open source real-time translation tools, geo-coding components, and old-school search software that hooked into some next-generation analytics and visualization components.

Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: Open Source Business Intelligence Tools — Not There”

Finding Books: Not Much Has Changed

Three or four years ago I described what I called “the book findability” problem. The audience was a group of confident executives trying to squeeze money from an old school commercial database model. Here’s how the commercial databases worked in 1979.

. . . . . .

What the write up triggered was the complete and utter failure of indexing services to make an attempt to locate, index, and provide a pointer to books regardless of form. The baloney about indexing “all” information is shown to be a toothless dragon. The failure of the Google method and the flaws of the Amazon, Library of Congress, and commercial database providers is evident.

Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: Finding Books — the Failure of Amazon, Google, and Commercial Catalogs — Findability Zero…”

Enterprise Search: Confusing Going to Weeds with Being Weeds

I seem to run into references to the write up by a “expert”. I know the person is an expert because the author says:

As an Enterprise Search expert, I get a lot of questions about Search and Information Architecture (IA).

The source of this remarkable personal characterization is “Prevent Enterprise Search from going to the Weeds.” Spoiler alert: I am on record as documenting that enterprise search is at a dead end, unpainted, unloved, and stuck on the margins of big time enterprise information applications. For details, read the free vendor profiles at www.xenky.com/vendor-profiles or, if you can find them, read one of my books such as The New Landscape of Search.

Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: Search is Dead — and Search “Experts” are the Walking Dead”

Enterprise Search: Fee Versus Free

I read a pretty darned amazing article “Is Free Enterprise Search a Game Changer?” My initial reaction was, “Didn’t the game change with the failures of flagship enterprise search systems?” And “Didn’t the cost and complexity of many enterprise search deployments fuel the emergence of the free and open source information retrieval systems?”

Many proprietary vendors are struggling to generate sustainable revenues and pay back increasingly impatient stakeholders. The reality is that the proprietary enterprise search “survivors” fear meeting the fate of  Convera, Delphes, Entopia, Perfect Search, Siderean Software, TREX, and other proprietary vendors. These outfits went away.

Read full exquisitely detailed death notice.

Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: Open Source Search Emergent, Proprietary Search on Death Row”

Fake Content: SEO or Tenure Desperation

Bottom Line Up Front: Indexing systems have a spotty record of identifying weaponized, shaped, or distorted information. 

Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: Search Engines Cannot Identify Fake Information”