I’ve been noticing quite a few patents on search technologies going out to IBM over the past year or so.

Gary Price, at Search Engine Watch, has been noticing this too, and provided an excellent post on IBM and Search a couple of days ago.

Most discussions I’ve seen about IBM’s research notes that their focus is on searches for businesses, and not for the web. So, what’s the difference between the two?

An article from IBM’s Systems Journal titled Towards the next generation of enterprise search technology highlights some of them.

One difference has to do with the underlying nature and interconnectedness of the web:

One factor is that although enterprise corpora are smaller, they lack the highly hyperlinked nature of the Web, and thus some of the most successful techniques for the Web, based on link analysis, do not apply in the enterprise.

There are other variables that make enterprise search more difficult than its web-based cousin:

Another factor is that in the enterprise there are additional security, reliability, and performance issues that complicate the problem. A well-publicized example is the need to protect the privacy of individuals’ personal data.

The biggest drawback in enterprise search, however, may be that some of the technologies developed for it don’t integrate well together:

The advanced technologies described above, for the most part, simply do not work together easily or well. Typically, each one of these technologies has a completely different view of the world, represents the underlying documents in different ways, and is concerned with performance in different areas. This situation arises in part from the developers of technologies being “algorithm-centric.”

The article then discusses an approach aimed at making technologies work together better to achieve more successful searches using their Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA). Looks interesting. There’s a whole IBM System Journal dedicated to Unstructured Information Management.

Why might this matter to the ordinary consumer, and to those who specialize in knowing something about search?

It’s possible that a successful implementation on the enterprise lever of this Unstructured Information management system might lead to its application on the web. And that’s something to think about.