This past week I attended the Enterprise Search Summit (ESS) in New York City. It was, as usual, a terrific conference, filled with interesting people and ideas. One particular highlight was the SearchDev.org dinner, hosted by New Idea Engineering (and sponsored by Attivio). I particularly enjoyed catching up with Nick Patience at the 451 Group; you can read his write-up of ESS here .

I was also very pleased to present on the topic of "Unified Information Access: Combining Search and BI Capabilities for Better Business Decisions" as part of the "Search Tools at Work" breakout. I focused primarily on our Baseball Demo , our FacetFinder and forthcoming image search module. Time ran out before I could present a variety of interesting case studies (featuring our customers), including quite remarkable work we are doing to support search with complex permissions, in real time, without using a database... more on that in a future post.

Some other highlights:

• Mark Bennett and Miles Kehoe of New Idea Engineering gave a terrific presentation covering things to do if you aren't happy with your current search solution. Their emphasis on metrics and analysis using queries is, in my view, absolutely spot-on - it's impossible to have a rational discussion without some common understanding of what the problem is. (I've written about the same topic before here.)

• James Sadler and Martin McElroy of PA Consulting talked about how to improve retrieval in the intranet setting. A key point: make sure results include recommendations. (I completely agree; I plan to blog about recommendations in a future post.)

• Seth Grimes of Alta Plana Corporation talked about the benefits of sentiment analysis. He pointed out that accurately detecting sentiment in all kinds of content and across cultures is very hard - but provides remarkable insight into how consumers view your company and its products. Some good discussion of the "scope" of sentiment analysis being important - document, sentence, entity-level all provide different value.

• In a packed session entitled "Marry Unstructured With Structured Information", Matt Brown from Forrester explained how Unified Information Access offers compelling new capabilities by bringing content and data together. He discussed the "heritage" of enterprise search and BI analytics, detailed why they are hard to bring together, and then got into specifics showing how value can be extracted from aggregate, unified data. He kindly mentioned Attivio as a company that offers a solution in this space.

My sincere thanks to Information Today for putting on another excellent show! You can find copies of some of the presentations archived here:

Day One

Day Two

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