Search is a magical thing. You type in a few keywords into the little box at the top right-hand corner of your screen or into your web browser and a world of relevant information unfolds itself right in front of your eyes.

Search is a half-baked truth. You type in a few keywords into that same little box and that lists comes back. You have no idea whether or not that list of results is "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth". Take look at the screenshot taken from my MacBook Pro's Spotlight desktop search for "trip to London". God knows what email message about swimsuits has to do with my trip to London this week. I dare not open that email for fear of embarrassment.

I have no way of knowing whether or not the results in my Spotlight search is an exhaustive list or merely a subset. It probably isn't and without a shadow of a doubt there are better search engines out there, but for me its good enough. The "top hit" was the right document I was looking for.

Search engine vendors have a hard time. They find themselves in a continuous war of words with one and another. Rocket-scientist generals explaining to their foot soldiers in the marketing departments why their rocket-science algorithms are better, more accurate, faster, and more truthful than the next guy.

You the user/buyer get bombarded by all sorts of messages such as "multi-axial guided navigation" (no wonder the military funds this stuff, its got the word 'guided'), "smart previews" (for the dumb user), "information transformation layers" and (my personal favourite) "meaning based computing". Selling complex solutions to complex problems. Yet in software design terms all these products pretty much only deal with one single use case: the information overloaded knowledge worker sitting in front of their search box wondering what to type in next. Sure some vendors take matters a step further by screen-scraping your screen for text and using that to "guide" your search by "understanding your current context", but its just more of the same, saving you a few keyboard strokes.

The problem with the typical search engine vendor is that they need to convince you that more complexity is better not worse, which goes completely against anything we've ever learned from Mother Nature.

Take Autonomy, pretty much top-of-the-heap king-of-the-hill in search vendor terms. I like Autonomy. Yes its expensive, yes its complex, it hits all of my geeky-techy buttons. I wish I had designed & built their software. I wish I was that smart.

Autonomy's message is typical: complexity complexity complexity. They're the "meaning based computing" guys. They even provide a page explaining why other current popular approaches are unworkable and what they say is pretty much correct, but in doing so only reinforce the perception that their own sector consists of a bunch of snake oil vendors.

How do you, the corporate buyer, measure "meaning based computing"? How do you know that when you type in "trip to london" into that little box you are getting the whole truth? Unfortunately you can't.

It's magic, it's a secret and they won't tell you.