One of the themes of this book has been the need to plan ahead, to assess what the needs of the organization will be in the years to come, so that the best strategic fit can be made between the requirements of the organization and the implementation of a search engine, whether for a website, the desktop, one or more intranets, or for enterprise-wide search. This chapter takes the risky approach of trying to suggest the directions that search technology will take in the future. A reader looking at this chapter even a year or so after publication may well be amused rather than informed.

Having spent over ten years in the business of high-technology market forecasting I look back on some of the reports that I wrote over that time and can now scarcely credit the astounding rate of progress that has been achieved, especially in the area of price–performance.

So, here are some predictions for the future, in the hope that, if nothing else, they will make you, the reader, focus on what is happening in the areas I have highlighted, and draw your own interpretation and vision.

Search is going to be a big business

Most IT markets grow on an S-curve, with a number of early adopters who then act as validation for the technology and its initial applications. After that there is a more general uptake, which is rarely truly exponential. Even though computer-based search has been available for over 40 years, its adoption by organizations is still in the very early stages. We are still at the very beginning of the S-curve, and the main reason for this is not that the technology did not work but that there was no identifiable market.

Now that market is beginning to exist. The advent of content management software to enable websites to be created and managed more easily, the total inability of organizations to find anything in e-mail servers, the widespread use of shared drives, the ubiquity of Microsoft SharePoint and the demands for compliance solutions are just a few of the drivers for this market.