Now Just Where Did I Put My Search Engine?
Daniel Oldis - May 24, 2006

Looking for Mr. Goodsearch

While most of the technical press focuses on unstructured documents, as well as extensible markup language (XML) and hypertext markup language (HTML) search technologies, the unpublicized truth remains that more than 80 percent of today's business applications require interaction with a relational database. As Terry Moriarty noted at the 2004 Software Development West Conference, "the organization is all about the database." The other "skeleton in the data closet," or shameful industry secret, is that there is relatively little search help for the business user when it comes to locating corporate information in databases. And since locating information accounts for 25 to 35 percent of an information user's time, the lack of focus on the database search ultimately results in a productivity blind spot in media and corporate attention...