KM Europe 2004 showcase

As part of the countdown to KM Europe 2004, which takes place in Amsterdam from the 8-10 November, ei magazine talks to search-engine giant Google about its plans for the event.

Since its inception, KM Europe has represented a forum for both practitioners and vendors from across the information-management spectrum. And, in line with Ark Group’s view of knowledge management as a concept that draws on information-retrieval technologies, Google will look to use this year’s show as a chance to establish its new plug-and-play enterprise-search solution, Google Search Appliance.

While some may dismiss Google and general web search as not relevant to more complex corporate information-management challenges, it is clear that Google is setting the standard among information consumers and is now deadly serious about tackling the enterprise-search marketplace.

The company will showcase Google’s Enterprise Technology. Using the same technology that powers Google.com, the Google Search Appliance is a plug-and-play enterprise-search solution that integrates hardware, software and support. “The application was designed to deliver the most relevant content possible, no matter how large an enterprise,” says Dave Girouard, general manager, enterprise for Google. “To achieve that goal, the application crawls content on intranets and enterprise websites, capturing data on highly distributed, heterogeneous networks in a single coherent view.”

According to IDC and Delphi Group, the average knowledge worker now spends an astonishing 25 per cent of his day looking for information. But how much of that information is embedded in documents that have been forgotten, mislabelled or misplaced? How much is locked in incompatible repositories, on dedicated servers or individual desktops - and as a result is unavailable to employees, partners or customers, because it takes too much work to find it?

“Without an effective search tool, document creators and administrators have to manually weight, rank or tweak content to ensure efficient retrieval,” says Girouard. “A come-as-you-are approach to indexing makes far more sense. After all, data that requires a laborious makeover to be included in search results is not only going to be time intensive, it will be costly. Unless an enterprise-search solution makes deploying content as easy as finding it, there’s no competitive advantage.”

Google is attending KM Europe 2004 as it considers the show to be one of the “premier meeting places for the knowledge industry and the key to future developments in knowledge management”. Indeed, since the launch of its Google Search Appliance, having a show that gives access to knowledge-management professionals is invaluable.

Since going public, search engine giant Google has threatened rivals Yahoo! and Microsoft with its Gmail service. It now continues to innovate with its much heralded enterprise-search solution.