The annual Enterprise Search Summit in New York continues to deliver excellent papers and intruiging conversations. The former are public, the latter usually very private. But then enterprise search is a very private business. To the best of my knowledge no one actually demonstrated a live search application in the conference, which is rather like going to a Magic Summit where the magicians talk about their illusions but never actually perform them. However you can learn a lot even from the description, and this year there were some outstanding papers. If I had to pick two they were Ed Dale (Ernst and Young) showing in a very classy piece of research how much effort it takes to get an IDOL upgrade to match the search performance of the incumbent Verity search application and Joe Lamantia with a stunning account of using all the tools in the user experience toolbox to enhance search performance. Joe ran on a bit, and it was interesting to see how many delegates felt that going to lunch was more important than listening to this virtuoso performance.

The opening keynote was by Ramesh Harji, Head of Information Exploitation at Capgemini in London talking about the work that he and his colleagues have been doing on assessing the impact of poor information discovery.  He was followed by Jared Spool illustrating the inter-relationship between search and navigation.  The conference then divided into three parallel tracks, luckily all very close to one another so that if the opening slides of one presentation did not grap my attention I could move to the next room. Lou Rosenfeld was another top-rate speaker, illustrating how web analytics and user experience are complementary. The former tells you what they are doing, and the latter tells you why. I did feel a little sorry for the team from Wyeth who ended up being followed by a speaker from Pfizer! Overall I felt that the vendor presentations were well delivered, though like others I felt that Nitin Mangtani took some liberties with a poorly veiled attack on Microsoft.

Not all the 'market leaders' were represented in the exhibition area but there were many others that I had not seen before, and it took careful planning to get round to speak to all of them. I was especially struck by Attivio, Chiliad, Comperio, Constellio, Mindbreeze and Perfect Search.

Overall I think that only for one hour out of two days did I feel I could catch up with emails rather than be in a session or the exhibition. The organisation (led by Michelle Manafy) was very good, the lunches were more than adequate and Coveo paid for a lot of drinks at the reception. Running enterprise search events is not easy, and Information Today run the only two in the world that I know of, and for that the industry and practitioners should be very appreciative.

Martin White