After the break Iain Fletcher (Search Technologies) highlighted the importance of data quality in achieving good search performance and Charlie Hull (Flax) described the migration of the web site search for News International from FAST ESP to Lucence Solr. Though this was a web site project the lessons learned were directly applicable to enterprise search migration projects.
The day closed with a keynote presentation from Matt Eichner (General Manager, Global Enterprise Search, Google) who spoke about Re-conceiving Enterprise Search. The next release (Version 7) of Google ESA is due out in a few months and it will be interesting to see if some of the visions for search that Matt talked about appear in Version 7. Matt's presentation was filmed by Google and a number of attendees were also interviewed during cocktails at the end of the day.
Day 2 started off with three excellent case studies. Gerard Bredenoord (Knowledge Innovations) described the implementation of a global search solution for Linklaters, a major law firm which included an impressive array of ecstatic responses from people as they used the new search solution for the first time. Melissa Shaffer (Harvard Business School) then talked about the value of search analytics and now even a small level of effort can make a significant difference to search quality, especially in identifying content that users expect to be searchable but which has not been indexed. Damon Fordham (3i PLC) concluded the session with a description of an implementation of Coveo at this UK-owned investment fund. The problems of making sure that secure information was indeed secure were quite substantial.
In the afternoon sessions Bhupesh Pattni and Enda Flynn (Comperio) presented their Sprint 0 approach to developing a business case for search investment, and then Hans-Joseph Jeanrond (Sinequa) compared the "Sand Dune" and "Nugget approaches to business case development" before inviting Clement Yunes (Atos) to describe how his company developed a comprehensive search-based expertise identification application for 78,000 staff worldwide. Mobile search design for enterprise applications was the theme of a presentation by Tyler Tate (TwigKit) and then Tony Russell-Rose (UXLabs) described his work on the development of a taxonomy for enterprise search use cases.
The day ended with an open forum to ensure that any remaining delegate questions were answered and then Stephen Arnold (ArnoldIT) have a virtuoso closing keynote which in covering again the implications of mobile, big data and cloud applications brought the conference back full circle to where it began.
Overall it was a very successful conference with high quality papers and a very engaged audience. The dates for 2013 are not yet finalised but the conference will be held in London in May.
Martin White is the Managing Director of Intranet Focus and the Chairman of Enterprise Search Europe.
Image courtesy of Jeffrey Beall via Flickr.