The other day Bloomberg Businessweek had an article telling that Facebook Delves Deeper Into Search.
I have always been advocating for having better search functionality in order to get more business value from your data. That certainly also applies to big data.
In a recent post called Big Reference Data Musings here on the blog, the challenge of utilizing large external data sources for getting better master data quality was discussed. In a comment Greg Leman pointed out, that there often isn’t a single source of the truth, as you for example could expect from say a huge reference data source as the Dun & Bradstreet WorldBase holding information about business entities from all over the world.
Indeed our search capabilities optimally must span several sources. In the business directory search realm you may include several sources at a time like supplementing the D&B WorldBase with for example EuroContactPool, if you do business in Europe, or the source called Wiki-Data (under rename to AvoxData) if you are in financial services and wants to utilize the new Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) for counterparty uniqueness in conjunction with other more complete sources.
As examined in Search and if you are lucky you will find combining search on external reference data sources and internal master data sources is a big opportunity too. In doing that you, as described the follow up piece named Wildcard Search versus Fuzzy Search, must get the search technology right.
I see in the Bloomberg article that Facebook don’t intend to completely reinvent the wheel for searching big data, as they have hired a Google veteran, the Danish computer scientist Lars Rasmussen, for the job.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 