The Future of Search Doesn’t Come in a Box: The Google Mini Says Goodbye

The future of search doesn’t come in a box.

Last week while many were on vacation, Google abandoned the smallest member of its’ Search Appliance family, the Google Mini. The small blue piece of external hardware was used for smaller data sets with a stable, some might say stagnant, data with slow and steady query rates. If you were a smaller business with search demands that weren’t, well–too demanding, then this piece of hardware could help you for a reasonable price tag.

Search evolves like all technologies do. Developers incorporate emerging technologies into their skill sets, and open source technologies like Lucene Solr have matured into a competitive option for companies of all sizes. IT managers are finally ready to move away from the confines of a Search Appliance in a box and move to a more agile solution that can offer room for growth, a lightweight application, and a healthy and growing community. Without the hefty annual licensing fees of a commercial product, Solr can save small to mid sized companies and startups valuable cash resources to invest in other areas of their respective businesses.

Open source technologies aside, many are speculating if Google will retire some of its other pieces of hardware like the well know GSA (Google Search Appliance). Although Google has a newly released version 6.14 with an updated website to easily explain features. Google continues evolving its enterprise search offerings to include a hosted search solution for e-tailers called Google Commerce Search, along with their standard Google Site Search. Neither of these products come in a physical blue or yellow box, and I wouldn’t expect Google’s next innovation to either.

There’s plenty lively discussion about this in the Enterprise Search Professionals discussion board on LinkedIn.

White Papers

Research is essential to choosing the right search technology for your organization. With new and complex technologies emerging every day, it can be difficult to navigate the path that will lead you to the right solution. Staying abreast of new tools and technology is a top priority for our team of software developers. We have reported on many tools and search technologies, their components and applications in a series of White Papers. Our papers are geared for the technology professional but often have enough business cases that illustrate how improving search can be of value to the needs of the business like analyzing large sets of data, better site performance, higher customer satisfaction and an overall healthy bottom line.

To indicate your interest in receiving our White Papers on the following subjects, click the headings below to enter your email.  From time to time we may update the paper or send relevant information on the subject, but by no means will we inundate you with email. Our White Papers are free when you sign up. 

Thank you for your interest in our work.  Please feel free to contact us to discuss your specific needs. We’re happy to discuss your options.

White Papers Published 2012:

Elasticsearch Evaluation

Reporting on Large Data Sets with Elasticsearch

Bridging the Gap: A Migration Path from Fast ESP to Lucene Solr

Museum Collection Search

And if you are just getting started or learning about Enterprise Search on a smaller scale, you can view these White Papers as well, no email necessary.

White Papers Published 2010-2011:

Mobile Search: Good UX means fewer touches, simple design

Mobile search must be designed for a minimum number of touches before users arrive at the end result. If it takes more than 2-3 touches, the user will look elsewhere for answers.

Mobile phones are rapidly taking over the scene of web development, significantly impacting commerce, advertising, gaming, entertainment, banking and news. 77% of the world’s population or 5.3 billion people are mobile subscribers. China and India lead the way in overall mobile growth. Virtually every measurable metric concerning mobile phone growth indicates entire economies being influenced by mobile technology. It’s not surprising that search technology is powering mobile growth just as it has it’s larger cousin the desktop.

Mobile search used to be clunky and a pain to use. Until recently, the answer was to miniaturize the website. For a time, people thought mobile search would never be as good as the desktop search. But, as people use their phones for more and more, it has forced designers to consider how to make search, as well as all mobile apps, simple and powerful and built for end users.

The Mobile Only World

Outside the US, countries like India, South Africa and Egypt are  leaders in mobile only--meaning users do not or infrequently use a desktop or laptop to access the Internet–making mobile search their primary mechanism for accessing queried information. Since these are also the countries sporting the most mobile growth, they are driving the need for quality relevant search for the mobile market.

Young and free

Another driving metric in the mobile game are young people. The under 25 crowd use a cell phone as their primary mode of accessing the Internet. Mobile phones, smart phones in particular, are used to do nearly everything. Younger people are more open to conducting transactions online via phone than any other demographic. Shopping, banking, GPS, social media, gaming–mobile access allows mobile subscribers to do everything they need to without restricting the user to an office.

Key differences for UX Impact

Key difference between mobile search and desktop search seem obvious. On a cell phone, the screen is much, much smaller. Users are on the go and may access the Internet between tasks or meetings, instead of being in one area. Access needs to be quick and simple. Mobile search must be designed for a minimum number of touches before users arrive at the end result. If it takes more than 2-3 touches, the user will look elsewhere for answers. Fewer touches mean a simpler design, engineered for the user without a lot of fanfare or complication.

Huge Growth

Google reports that 1 in 7 searches are now done via mobile vs. desktop. Mobile searches have increased fourfold in just the last year. Businesses need a mobile application to ensure they are reaching the inbound web traffic looking for their services and products. Mobile applications need a strong search technology to ensure the consumer can connect with the products or information they are looking for. The companies that build their web solution for the mobile market are the companies who will gain more market share and capture that 14% of customers searching for their products on the mobile web.

For the enterprise, accessing important information inside and outside the firewall is vitally important as more content is built within businesses and accessed digitally. With the mounting demand placed on mobile phones and devices, the performance we’ve come to expect from out desktop needs to be scaled to a smaller screen by simplifying wireframes with sophistication and well thought out design.

Our View
TNR Global’s expertise lies in deep back end knowledge using powerful search technologies to give users fast, relevant search results for enterprise sites and large web portals. Recognizing the need for search to work as powerfully for a mobile application as well as a web application, we have teamed up with talented UX designers specifically in the field of search application design for web and mobile. Whether you are looking for a customized UX front end for your search solution or an out of the box answer for mobile search, TNR can connect you with a total solution to answer your web based and mobile search needs. For a free consultation, contact us.

UK Software Company TwigKit Partners with TNR Global to Deliver Search Solutions for FAST and Solr

“TNR’s focus on implementing and servicing enterprise search solutions across a number of platforms is an excellent fit for TwigKit,” says Stefan Olafsson, TwigKit’s co-founder and chief architect.

Hadley, MA–November 28, 2011–TNR Global announced today that they have entered into a strategic partnership with London, UK software company TwigKit.

“Our companies have a number of qualities in common that allow us to combine forces and service clients with a very complete solution” says Karen Lynn, TNR Global’s Director of Business Development. “TwigKit has a very appealing user interface for users across several platforms, and TNR’s strength is on creating a powerful back end search application. Combined, it’s a powerful solution for companies needing a strong search function with an easy to use interface.”

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Representatives from the two companies have been in friendly talks for over a year now, meeting periodically at industry conferences. Both companies were in attendance at the Apache Lucene EuroCon conference in Barcelona last October, where the partnership was formalized.  Both presentations from TwigKit and TNR can be viewed here.

“TNR’s focus on implementing and servicing enterprise search solutions across a number of platforms is an excellent fit for TwigKit,” says Stefan Olafsson, TwigKit’s co-founder and chief architect. “Our software enables polished user interfaces for search-based applications, provides a rapid development framework, and works across a number of enterprise search platforms including Microsoft FAST and Apache Solr. We’re excited about working with TNR to produce search solutions that boast both a superb user experience and an outstanding technical implementation.”

TwigKit powers enterprise search applications in government and blue-chip organizations. Encapsulating search best practices into configurable components, TwigKit establishes a platform-independent standard compatible with most search technologies including Microsoft FAST, Google Search Appliance, and Apache Solr. Started in London in 2009, TwigKit’s founders organize the 350-member Enterprise Search London meetup, regularly speak at conferences, and write about search and user experience for publications including A List Apart, Boxes & Arrows, and UX Magazine.

TNR LOGO

TNR Global (TNR) is a systems design and integration company focused on enterprise search and cloud computing solutions. TNR develops scalable web-based search solutions built on the open source LAMP stack. TNR has over 10 years of hands-on experience in web systems and enterprise search implementations, both proprietary and open source search technologies, specializing in FAST and Lucene Solr search applications. Specifically TNR works with content intensive websites for companies and organizations in the following industries: News Sites, Publishing, Web Directories, Information Portals, Web Catalogs, Education, Manufacturing and Distribution, Customer Service, and Life Sciences. TNR Global has offices in western Massachusetts.

Selling Search Internally–Part 2–How to get buy in from the staff

“The truth is that if your end user of the solution doesn’t like the solution, they won’t use it.”

You’ve convinced the powers that be that a search solution is a necessary strategy for success and competitive advantage. Congratulations! Nice work. Think your job is done? Not by a long shot.


Ask your staff–what would a good solution look like to them? After you’ve decided to move forward with a search solution, it’s important, no–it’s crucial that you consider strongly the end user. If you have a web portal that you manage, it’s worth polling your typical customer to gather vital data on how they want their experience to be. If you are looking at an enterprise search solution, you need to spend time exploring what your staff wants and needs out of a solution, and ensure your search solution addresses design for them….not a boilerplate solution that only meets some of your needs. Search is an expensive endeavor, if you’re spending the money, you might as well get exactly what you want.


The truth is that if your end user of the solution doesn’t like the solution, they won’t use it. So getting the end user involved in the planning stage of the search project is vital to it’s overall success. If they have input to it’s overall features and design, they will be more invested in using it. Involving users manufactures all kinds of good-will collateral that can help develop better morale and a positive workplace. Doing this early in the process also introduces change more slowly to users–and people rarely react well to lots of radical change.  Making them a part of the process and doing it early with lots of prepping for change can affect overall satisfaction rates with the search implementation after it’s complete.


Once the implementation actually goes live, you’ll need to ensure a training plan is in place and executed to ensure ongoing success.  A successful search solution isn’t just done once it’s implemented.  You need to work to include your whole team in the training process, and allow them to see for themselves how the solution is going to help them in their day to day tasks. If you included your staff in the planning of the design from the beginning, you’ll be much more successful once the solution is deployed, because they were part of the solution all along.

Search and Steel Girders

“Search by itself may look like a simple box, but behind the box is a foundry of girders, cross beams, and structural support that allows you to find what you need.”

“Search ties people together…”

This was one of the many themes at the Enterprise Search Summit in Washington, DC last week. It seems like a fairly obvious statement, but it quickly becomes part of the landscape, taken for granted even though the landscape couldn’t function without it. I have compared search function to the steel girders of a skyscraper. When you walk into the building, you aren’t thinking about the beams holding the building up or connecting floors, but without them, you wouldn’t have a building at all (you couldn’t even find the lobby). Other metaphors overheard include oxygen (invisible yet essential), sunlight (lest we remain in the dark) and electricity (everything stops without it).

Attendees of the conference know how important search is to companies, but increasingly, companies are taking search for granted. There is a fundamental gap in communicating the importance and difficulty of implementing a good search platform.

Companies who need search to run on their website or intranet, expect search to work as it does on the Internet, but this is an apples and oranges scenario.

Here are the main disconnects:

  1. Search is easy
  2. Search is cheap
  3. It never has to be touched again

People expect search inside the firewall to function much like Google does outside the firewall. Google exists for end users and is really, really incredible. It Geo-locates, it auto-completes. It uses your browsing history to provide more relevant results. And you had no financial investment in using this really lovely, elegant, useful tool that doesn’t just assist your Internet experience, but facilitates it. But behind the firewall, things are different. Let me explain.

  • Your business content isn’t publicly available or known. I mean, that would be bad, right? It’s behind the firewall for a reason. So keeping it there yet allowing your staff to access certain levels of information takes some architecture and planning.
  • Google has thousands of developers working on this beautiful, incredible technology every day. They finance this by ad content. How many people do you have on your search team? And how much of their day do they really spend on search? What department is being billed for it? Business leaders need to embrace this as a necessary cost of doing business and budget accordingly, or face the crippling result of staff and customers not being able to find the information they need.

  • 80% of your content is unstructured. Meaning, search engines can’t really read it until some love and care is put into cleaning the data. This is a vital, yet time intense process. Our VP of Search Technologies Michael McIntosh says “We spend about 90% of our time on the document processing pipeline, conditioning data to be fed into the engine.” Moreover, unstructured data isn’t a set number. It’s being creating faster than you can blink by your entire enterprise. Processing it is never a done deal.


So if search connects us, hopefully this finds you thinking about search in more realistic terms. Search by itself may look like a simple box, but behind the box is a foundry of girders, cross beams, and structural support that allows you to find what you need to “make money outside the firewall or save money inside the firewall.”

TNR Global Attends KMWorld’s Enterprise Search Summit Fall 2011

A proof of concept and rapid integration are essential for search customers–they cannot visualize what a search solution will look like without some help from the search professional.

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Last week TNR Global attended the Enterprise Search Summit organized by KMWorld in Washington, DC.  VP of Search Technologies Michael McIntosh and Director of Business Development Karen E. Lynn attended the three day conference and Enterprise Solutions Showcase at the Marriott Wardman Park.  Several companies were in attendance, and some common themes emerged.  Among these were designing for users, dealing with unstrcutured content, the need for better search and content analytics to facilitate better search results, as well as tagging content as part of a best practice in workflow.  Also discussed was the need for search vendors to demonstrate to search customers was “right looks like” in a search solution.  A proof of concept and rapid integration are essential for search customers–they cannot visualize what a search solution will look like without some help from the search professional.

An unexpected surprise came when the speaker on open source search was unable to attend at the last moment, our own Michael McIntosh was asked to step in and present on the subject.  Fortunately, he was fresh from his presentation at Apache Lucene EuroCon and already had his presentation loaded on his machine.  Michael discussed Solr and made general points on migrating from a commercial search engine like FAST ESP to a open source platform like Lucene Solr.

Overall it was a great conference with lots of informative talks and friendly search professionals.  We’re looking forward to the next Enterprise Search Summit in Spring, 2012.

Search Fuels Business Intelligence for Decision Making

“The jungle is dark, but full of diamonds.” said Arthur Miller. Can your search technology find the gems buried inside your own business?

“The jungle is dark, but full of diamonds.” said Arthur Miller. The same can be said about the invaluable data inside your business. It’s there, ready to be mined. But unless you have the right tools, you’ll never get to those diamonds.


Content is expanding at an exponential rate. I don’t know anyone in any business who can keep up with the pace of content growth, without the use of powerful search engines to find and extract relevant information. Business analysts expect content to grow 800% over the next 5 years. Business intelligence requires extraction of the right information, and most enterprises have both structured and unstructured data. Structured data is easy for most search engines to search. The rub is in unstructured content–of which there is abundance. Unstructured content is said to account for 70-80% of data in all organizations. This type of content is often in the form of documents, email messages, health records, HTML pages, books, metadata, audio, video, and various other files. All these files have to be “cleaned up” before feeding them through a search engine in order to get results with any kind of value or relevance.


Mining this data is going to be essential for not just the success, but the survival of many businesses. James Kobielus, an analyst at Forrester Research, reports in an interview with ComputerWorld that businesses will increasingly turn to a self-service BI throughout 2011 and beyond. “Increasingly, enterprises will adopt new Web-based interactive querying and reporting tools that are designed to put more data analytics capabilities into the hands of end users,” he said. A good search engine that can find data quickly and easily can “take the burden off IT and speed up the development of reports to a considerable degree,” Kobielus said. The information mined by a search engine tuned to the specific business needs facilities better decision making for people a every job function within the enterprise. “Because every business is a little different, and so many organizations house so much unstructured content, most search engines can’t cover everything that is needed without some customization” said Michael McIntosh, our VP of Search Technologies at TNR Global. “Data conditioning is vital to unstructured content. Without someone paying attention to filtering out the garbage in unstructured content, you’re not going to get a good search result. The last thing a business needs is it’s search results working against them.”


“The jungle is dark, but full of diamonds.” said Arthur Miller. Can your search technology find the gems buried inside your own business?


For more information on how data mining and a customized search engine can move your business forward, contact us for a free consultation.


We’re at Apache Lucene EuroCon in Barcelona 2011

“We’re certain that the urgency to migrate off FAST ESP will be ramping up significantly.”

We’re very excited to be in attendance at the Apache Lucene EuroCon in Barcelona October 17, 18, 19, and 20th, 2011.  Our own Michael McIntosh, VP of Search Technologies will be presenting a talk on October 19th, Enterprise Search: FAST ESP to Lucene Solr.  The good folks at Lucid Imagination are presenting the conference and will be video recording his talk for future broadcast.

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After the conference, Michael will author a White Paper on migrating from FAST ESP to Lucene Solr, expected in November 2011.  For a free copy of the White Paper, email us expressing your interest at fast2solr@tnrglobal.com. We believe that those businesses operating on a Linux system will be seeking out the power of Lucene Solr as their licenses expire and support for FAST ESP dries up. We’ve worked with FAST ESP for 7 years and understand it’s strengths and weaknesses.  We know businesses who are used to the power of FAST ESP will need something just as powerful, and Lucene Solr is a very nice fit.  “It’s a robust platform, capable of a lot that FAST ESP covers,” said Michael.  “We’re certain that the urgency to migrate off FAST ESP will be ramping up significantly.”

Living with Bad Enterprise Search: The Costs of Not Finding What Your Business Needs

Search technology is critical to the mission of any business. It facilitates cash flow, revenue, Business Intelligence (BI), productivity and employee satisfaction.

Do you remember TV Guide? There was a time when TV Guide sat on nearly every coffee table in every living room in America. If you didn’t have a subscription, you would grab it in the checkout line at the grocery store every week. If you wanted to plan out your evening in front of the tube, you would pick it up, thumb through it, read the synopsis of the show, and make an informed decision about watching Dallas or Falcon Crest that evening.


Then everything changed. Not overnight, but let’s fast forward to today. If you are 20, you don’t know what TV Guide is. Most cable packages have a guide built in so you can plan your viewing, record shows you will miss, or call up ones you want to watch, even from last season. Schedules for networks are posted online. And it’s a good thing, because back when TV Guide sat on our coffee tables, there were three networks. How many are there now? Imagine how thick that TV Guide would be.


The explosion of content is not exclusive to television. Businesses have had an estimated 60% growth in digital content per year, and it shows no signs of stopping. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses haven’t upgraded their cable box, so to speak. They are looking for crucial documents and data on a manual dial. The truth is, companies have been living with bad search for a long time. And they’ve been paying for it.


The IDC estimates that 2.5 hours a day per employee are wasted looking for information they need to perform their job, or recreating that information altogether. Additionally, making sound decisions depends strongly on having valid information to make those decisions. Without access to information, bad business decisions are made, and bad business decisions are deadly to the enterprise. Business intelligence efforts can fall short without the right search platform powering fast relevant results. Worst of all, if your customers cannot find the product or service they need on your system, they will go somewhere else for it.


Content Management Systems are gaining in popularity, but what’s powering the search? How well does it deal with unstructured content? Does it give results with the relevance you need to make the best decision? Can your employees find what to need to execute their tasks? Can customers find your products?


Search technology is critical to the mission of any business. It facilitates cash flow, revenue, Business Intelligence (BI), productivity and employee satisfaction. It has an immediate impact of the bottom line of the business. It is an essential ingredient to the successful enterprise on so many levels, to run a business with inadequate search technology is like using an old copy of TV Guide to try and find and decide what to watch.

If you are assessing your search platform and it’s bottom line impact on your business, contact us.  We can analyze your systems and provide a free consultation on the best enterprise search solution for your company.