As a search manager or search team lead, you’ll occasionally be asked to consider whether you should migrate to a new technology platform. In fact, this may come up on a regular basis, as salespeople “just check in” (in case things have changed since the last time you politely declined), or the latest Forrester or Gartner analyst report appears on your executive team’s desk.
If you’re generally happy with your technology platform and unwilling to move, these approaches can be a distraction from the real work of improving search. Yes, there can be good reasons to move to a new technology, but don’t discount the advantages of sticking with your current system – you know it well and you’ve probably made significant improvements to it. However if you are thinking of moving, here’s some things to consider.
Buy versus Build
This is a never-ending question: should you build your own platform around open source technology, or buy a pre-existing commercial solution? Proponents of the former will point to how open source is freely available, whereas fans of the latter will tell you how great it is that everything comes ready out of the box. The real picture is more complicated: open source requires a significant amount of initial and ongoing engineering effort and (hopefully) active participation in the community, whereas commercial solutions will also require some engineering effort as whatever is in the box won’t completely solve your problem – and there’s also a fee both at the start and for ongoing support to consider. Open source isn’t free, but closed source locks you into the vendor’s roadmap and pricing plan.
(I’ve long been a proponent of open source search engines such as Apache Solr, OpenSearch or Vespa – but I can also recognise that open source isn’t for everyone).
The cost of search migration
Platform migrations are risky, no matter if you’re moving from open source to/from closed, or between different providers of either option.
- They always take much longer than you think: it’s common to see estimates of a few months for a migration but the reality may be counted in years. At worse, you may have to back off and stop the process to prevent escalating costs.
- They may reveal hidden problems: you’ll be digging deep into where your data comes from, finding out those customisations done in the past that no-one remembers the reason for and finding new requirements that probably weren’t considered when you decided to migrate. Beware dragons!
- Don’t forget learning time: your team should know your current system well, but will need time to be trained on anything new.
- They may not even make search much better: your current solution may already be pretty good and the benefit of a migration (in terms of user satisfaction and business performance) less than you originally thought. Introducing more effective offline and online testing or a proper search issue triage process may be of more benefit overall.
To reduce the risk, you need to be very clear about expectations; plan incremental, small steps – and be pessimistic and realistic about timelines.
Don’t rely on analysts
Analyst reports are in my opinion not a reliable source of information about technology options. It’s well known that the larger analysts operate a model where they consider only some vendors, and the ones they focus on most tend to have a commercial relationship with the analyst (it can come dressed up as ‘partnership’ but let’s call it for what it is: pay to play, or at least pay to access). This is why most analyst reports fail to consider open source options, as these projects tend to have few financial resources (unless they’re single-vendor open source, which has its own disadvantages). Startups with little history of providing effective solutions may suddenly appear in a high position as they spend some of their funding dollars.
Analyst companies often name and create new technology categories: “Cognitive Search” was popular some years ago and of course nowadays “AI” themes are common. Strangely the same companies seem to appear in these new categories, although they’re still basically a search engine provider: it’s a mutually beneficial relationship for marketing for both the featured companies and the analyst, where a new exciting market appears, the companies are shown to be leading this new market and the analyst to be providing insight into it, even if the latter invented it in the first place.
Avoiding the time sink
If you’re regularly asked by management or others to consider a new technology choice, here are some ways to reduce any wasted effort:
- Have a clear feature list – what you need the platform to do and what is not required. Keep this updated as your product evolves, data and user needs change.
- Ask for proof of the supplier or project’s capabilities – case studies, reference customers (that hopefully you can talk to directly rather than through a vendor), performance data.
- When a supplier is asked to provide a demo, remember the demo is never the product – it’s carefully set up to make the product look its very best.
- Ask the supplier to run a Proof of Concept, with your data not theirs. Use your own testing systems to verify this, not the suppliers.
- Be suspicious of any new ‘magical’ capabilities – it’s rare that any new platform has something that no other platform has. The supplier should be able to explain the detail (under NDA if necessary).
- Get independent advice – there are plenty of experts out there to advise you, and the best have no ‘skin in the game’, e.g. have no relationship with any vendor that might cause them to be less than neutral.
So why move at all, ever?
It’s unlikely that any piece of technology will suit you forever – even if you follow a sensible upgrade path. The world changes and we have to change with it. You should keep up with the release cycle of your current platform, even if you lag behind a little in upgrading – make sure you know what’s coming next (and maybe what’s a little too new to adopt). Keeping an eye on the competitors of your current platform is also a good idea – maybe they’ve concentrated more on something you really do need, or their pricing strategy is more favourable (this also helps when you negotiate with your current supplier!).
When and if you do decide to investigate migration to a new platform, or carry out a significant version upgrade, there is also the opportunity for a wider conversation about search. If you don’t have good enough test data to evaluate new technology options, you’ve now got a good reason to create it. If you’ve not analyzed customer feedback to find out which parts of their search journey they can struggle with, now’s the time. If you don’t have good analytic data showing how search succeeds and fails, why not? If your team don’t have the core knowledge to question the usefulness of any promised new features, buy them the books and/or training they need and send them to some relevant conferences or Meetups.
Perhaps this is a better way to ‘fix your search’ – fix your search process and support your search people!
If you need help figuring out if, when and why to move search platforms, contact me today