Autonomy continues to try to justify concept search versus keyword search.

“Say I’m interested in the effect of oil pollution on the penguin population of Alaska. Although that’s the idea someone is looking for they will walk up to a search engine and just type ‘penguin’.”

“They would never walk up to a librarian and just say ‘penguin’. And that’s the Google effect. We’ve been trained to assume the search engine is dumb and that takes a little un-training in enterprise.”

The tough part is that a lot of people use Google throughout the day. If I am jumping back-and-forth between Google and an Autonomy-powered portal, for instance, how realistic is it to expect me to shift gears between keyword and concept search? I have seen the power of concept-based searching and Autonomy, specifically, but the “un-training” is much easier said than done.

“Search is going to become a lot more than typing words into a box. It’s going to become about alerting. This has just happened, or this has just happened in your Malaysia office or we’re getting an awful lot of complaints coming into the call centre about this problem with the product,” said Lynch.

I agree with this as well. Maybe Autonomy should give up on user-executed search in the Enterprise and focus on behind-the-scenes alerting, clustering, and mining of unstructured data.

Quotes are from: Interview: Mike Lynch, founder of Autonomy. Silicon.com Sep 19 2005 8:36PM GMT [Moreover Technologies – Knowledge management news]