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The best sources of information with which to clarify the confused vendor landscape are the vendors themselves.

One evening I was sipping a nine-dollar Martini with an old friend at The Wooden Iron, an upscale watering-hole in our little town of Wayne. Wayne has become aggressively BoBo-fied (see below), and now boasts more gourmet coffee-shops per capita than Seattle.

I was bemoaning my project situation to my friend, a Senior Manager at Bearing Point, a large IT consultancy. I described the confusing Search vendor landscape, and my difficulties at pigeon-holing the vendors. In a fight for market share in an emerging market, the vendors were all things to all customers. He chuckled and sipped, then shared a strategy he had used in a recent project.

“It is not necessarily quick, but it works.” He said. “Here is what you do. Prepare a Request for Information for your project, but leave it quite vague. Put in some generalities about your situation, but leave out details on what you believe to be the key issues. Your goal is to get the Vendors to position themselves from their strengths, and to educate you as to the differentiators among the offerings.”

So, that is just what I did. I prepared a Request for Information document, and sent it to Vendors in each category of offering. I included general questions about the results we were interested in, and invited the Vendors to describe their offerings, and how their products were differentiated in the market place.

I followed the RFI up with conference calls, where I could ask general questions and get an education about the issues.

I found some surprising things: All of the Vendors could access content in relational data bases, an item that I thought would be a key differentiator. And, I had believed that a key functional differentiator was the ability to extract categorization schemes and hierarchies dynamically from the document sets. I discovered that the more valuable feature is the ability to apply existing, industry-standard taxonomies to the indexing process and the presentation of results lists.

Now I had to figure out what Taxonomy was, and how it applied to search.