Chad Johnson

Last year Google introduced groundbreaking image recognition technology as part of their release of Google Photos.  Deep neural networks could identify objects, people and places inside of photographs with astonishing accuracy, completely autonomously. As fascinating as this technology is, I was certain that Google would keep it locked away inside their own products like Google Photos and Google Drive […]

Last week I was starting to design a new demonstration environment for our Search and Knowledge Discovery practice. It would simulate a search application for a high tech call center, searching across a customer support case repository. I was having difficultly coming up with a scenario that would be applicable to a wide audience and include all of the diverse features that I […]

The topic of migrating from one enterprise search platform to another has come up a few times in recent weeks because of the news discussed here. Migrations of any kind can be painful.  The new search platform will work differently, in unexpected ways, and it will take a while to fully understand those differences.  The new platform will have quirks […]

Warning: The future of search is going to get very personal. Hold on to your tin foil hats. Let’s begin with a brief history of the search and knowledge discovery field. Search + Analytics In 1997, Google launched the Google.com search engine.  4.3 seconds later, Google started looking at everyone’s search queries.  Just kidding.  Sort of. […]

It has been exactly one week since Google announced that it would be sunsetting the Google Search Appliance over the next three years. And what a week it has been. I have had the opportunity to speak with media representatives at Fortune and CIODive, I have spoken with several current and prospective customers of the Google Search […]

Google is a visionary and a cloud-first organization. In an announcement today, Google has decided to sunset the hardware-based Google Search Appliance (GSA) and focus their engineering efforts on cloud-based solutions. The GSA will remain supported for the next three years, giving you plenty of time to evaluate the future of your enterprise search investment and continue to […]

How do computers see the world?  Can they tell if we are happy?  Can they predict what we are going to have for dinner next Tuesday?  Can they recognize when we are sick? Well, my iPhone can.  Sort of. I was (finally) recovering from a nasty cold last week and I opened the Health app on my phone and noticed that […]

Chris Cook joined our Google practice as a Solution Architect in 2013, arriving with over 25 years of IT experience, including technology deployments, network and security systems, and enterprise search solutions.  Chris has architected and deployed some of our largest and most complex Google Search Appliance implementations, including an aggressive project that indexed a multi-million document SharePoint repository and […]

For many years, People Search with the Google Search Appliance was essentially a glorified phonebook lookup.  Our customers could search for colleagues by name or title, and retrieve basic information like phone numbers or addresses.  Even the advent of ‘Expert Search’ did not tangibly change the situation — it just made the phonebook-style lookup easier […]

Sadly, I did not win the Powerball Lottery (I admit it is hard to win when you don’t play) so I am still here writing blog posts. Oh well, I kind of like my job. The frenzy did get me thinking about how big is a billion. A little back of the napkin math suggests […]

Alok Gupta joined our Google practice in 2013 and has quickly become one of our go-to Technical Architects for complex implementations and custom connector development. Alok has worked with a wide variety of clients, including high-tech support organizations, major airlines, and retail food giants. It was a pleasure to talk to him about his experiences […]

In 2009, our Google Search Appliance practice was a practice of one – me.  By the end of the year, Shruti Sundaresh had joined me as a co-developer on our first large project.  Her programming skills and experience with web content management systems and data migrations were invaluable.  Shruti has recently started to transform our GSA practice […]