Search Engine Pain

I love and hate my desktop search engines. After much knocking around with all the major engines, I settled on Google. The interface is not what I would choose but it supports most of my applications.

What is driving me nuts is that it can't seem to figure out what I mean. It's great at looking for what I say but can't get a handle on what I mean. This is the Achilles heel of this technology. If you already know what you are looking for, they excel. If not, they actually waste your time looking through useless hits.

Here's an example. Several months ago, I had created a spreadsheet to show me the true costs of a VoIP provider. The spreadsheet compared those costs against the actual costs of my traditional phone provider. Now that I'm getting serious about getting VoIP, I went looking for this spreadsheet. The problem was that I hadn't actually put the term VoIP anywhere in the spreadsheet and couldn't remember the name of the providor I had run the analysis on.

Of course, I searched on VoIP, Vonage (a competitor), and Internet Phone. No luck. I found the file the old fashioned way. I picked through a bunch of folders until I saw the file name. At that point I slapped myself in the forehead and said "Oh right! That was the name of the file!" If only the search engine knew what I wanted rather than what I said.

I can already hear the shouts of "but that's not what it was intended to do!" True, very true. But that's what people want it to do. The problem - the real pain - is not that we can't remember where we put stuff. It's that we can't even remember what it was in the first place.

So, if you are one of those really smart people who knows how to find what I'm looking for, even when I don't know what I'm looking for, let me know. You will have my eternal gratitude.

Desktop Search Engines

I've been testing out just about every freely available desktop search engine. I love the idea but tend to hate the implementations. My major complaints are:

1. File support is lacking. I know they can't support all file formats but Microsoft Office is not the only office suite out there. Outlook is also not the only e-mail client. Some support the OpenOffice.org suite, Firefox and Thunderbord exists but it's hit or miss.
2. The interfaces are terrible. Google gives you something akin to their web page but it's too small for a big result set. Yahoo and Copernic do a bit better, with a grid-like list that is more compact and straightforward.
   
3. Results are inconsistent. It's the typical problem of balance. Some return too few results. which means you miss what you are looking for. Others too many which nullifies the whole reason for the desktop search engine.

If we had the Google engine with a better interface, it would probably be the winner. The plug-in architecture makes the difference. So what if Google doesn't search OpenOffice.org documents. There is a plug-in for it. It also seems to have the best balance between too little and too much information.

If only the interface was better...

Open Source Fails for Enterprise Applications

I have this real affection for open source software. The whole idea of legions of programmers, working together for the shear joy of creating is very attractive. It speaks to the geek in me. What bothers me is the near religious fervor of the open source community coupled with this "open source everywhere" attitude. I'm sorry folks, but open source doesn't work for everything.

Let's, for the moment, set aside the whole "what is open source and what is not" debate. Sure, some products marketed as open source aren't really and open source is not necessarily the same thing as free. That doesn't take away from the usefulness of the model. It is a detail that still needs attention.

It is more useful to dialog about where open source is useful and where it is not. Clearly, open source has shown that it is attractive as infrastructure. Linux and the Apache web server, to name two popular packages, are the backbones of many corporate systems.

On the desktop, open source makes infinite sense. Applications like Firefox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice are popular because they are multi-platform and evolve features more quickly than commercial applications. Even more interesting is that the development agenda tends to coincide closely with the end-user's agenda. They are not hampered by the need to make money.

When you step up to Enterprise applications, open source's advantages dim. Look at a typical open source Enterprise applications such as ERP or CRM. These are complex applications that rely on a host of infrastructure products. Practically none support commercial products such as Oracle. The true cost of these products is not in the liecense costs but maintenance, development, and administration.

I'm constantly amazed at how long the list of required software is for an open source application. Commercial Enterprise applications almost always ship with most of the software they need. The list of non-bundled software is short, usually only a database and operating system, sometimes a development framework.

Contrast that with the a typical open source version. One product I saw required Linux, MySQL, Apache web server, Tomcat, Perl, PHP, and three other open source products I hadn't even heard of. You had to get that all in place, tested, and fully operational befor installing the application.

That's an incredible amount of work. It also doesn't plug-in to the infrastructure of many companies which rely on Windows and Oracle. I can even understand the need to first install the database and maybe a development framework, but the all the other packages? I can't see too many companies wanting to do that unless they have already made a committment to these applications and packages. This complexity makes maintenance cost more, not less.

On top of that, who is going to support it? The application vendor will provide support for their product but support for the ten other pieces of software are either going to come from a bunch of other vendors or "the community". That won't give a system administrator a warm and fuzzy for sure.

The idea of Enterprise open source is great. The packaging is all wrong. Vendors need to make all products available in a single install, expand support for non-open source infrastructure especially databases, and reduce the shear number of contingent packages. Otherwise, this will be great for hobbyists but never for the datacenter.

Meanwhile, I'll keep using Firefox and OpenOffice which install everything I need nice and easy.