Is Search the New Portal?

Well, that's what some of the hype in the market would have you believe.

Let's look at what's driving this. The last decade has seen continuous improvements to search technology. At least in theory, today's search engines can crawl more complex repositories, can handle many more documents, and run faster and more efficiently. All you need -- the story goes -- is the ability to convert search results to an RSS feed, build some kind of a simple widget-based environment that displays those feeds, and you are up and running with a functional portal application.

But don't stop there.  The same logic can also get extended to other web technologies. Search engines can act as replacement to traditional integration mechanisms since they can crawl multiple repositories. They can also handle more sophisticated applications such as e-discovery.  So, why invest in portal or portal-like technologies at all?

My advice: don't buy into this hype.

Before you decide to build a web or portal application that's driven by your search engine's index, first consider if that's the best approach to get at all types of information you want to display. You'll quickly find some inherent limitations.

For example, most search engines make certain assumptions and approximations in the way versions, security, and duplicates get handled. The security profile on the document might have changed after your search engine indexed it. Sure, you can take advantage of your search engine's "late-binding" security capabilities, but that only adds more overhead to processing time.

Moreover, in those cases where your application knows exactly what to get from the repository, using search indexes and queries adds even more overhead. "Showing 1 of 1" is hardly the best way to display the local temperature inside a weather gadget.

The point then is that a search-based query is not the most optimum way to access your back-end data for the typical diversity of enterprise portal scenarios. Before making a major platform decision, be sure to consider alternatives that could prove faster more accurate.


Our customers say...

"I've seen a lot of basic vendor comparison guides, but none of them come close to the technical depth, real-life experience, and hard-hitting critiques that I found in the Search & Information Access Research. When I need the real scoop about vendors, I always turn to the Real Story Group."


Alexander T. Deligtisch, Co-founder & Vice President, Spliteye Multimedia
Spliteye Multimedia

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