A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

The Complexity of Product Lifecycle and Google’s Blindspot

The Complexity of Product Lifecycle and Google’s Blindspot
Oleg
Oleg
5 September, 2013 | 3 min for reading

The power of search giants like Google is enormous these days. Think about the amount of information Google, Twitter and Facebook are processing and you will be knocked down by the numbers. Consumerization is a significant trend these days and everybody are thinking how we can apply well proven web and open source technologies in the enterprise field. Think about product designs, engineering documents, Bill of Materials – things that we commonly considering as product data. Eventually, the dream could be to see how Google’s engineers are recommending best parts to use or cracking Bill of Materials with 100s levels of data.  Not so fast…

When it comes to a product data you can discover that this type of information processing is different from what we got to know on the web. It starts from the diminished importance of ranking mechanism based on other people discoveries. For example, if you happen to be searching for “Part CHI-93939-STD” it may not come up on the first pages of a search.  But it may be found more directly via a connection to an existing assembly that references it. Data semantics in this case is more important than data ranking.

I recently came across the following study – Top Google Result Gets 36.4% of Clicks.  Have a look at the charts, you’ll get my point quickly: if you are out of first five (5) page results, you essentially don’t exist.  So if you’re “Lady Gaga”, you are certain to appear and ranked in the top pages. These days “social ranking” is adding some additional flavors to the overall search results. Nevertheless if you are “Part CHI-93939-STD”, then chances are, you don’t exist!

Another interesting blindspot of Google search – lifecycle data. Few days ago, I caught an interesting study – Filling a Search Engines Blindspots. Here is the passage describing lifecycle blindspot:

Today, Christian von der Weth and Manfred Hauswirth at the National University of Ireland in Galway identify one blind spot in Google’s coverage and describe their vision for how to fill it. This information blackspot consists of location-specific information that is only useful for people for short periods of time. An example would be a question such as whether an advertised bargain is still available at a particular shop. Another is to ask whether parking spaces are available at a public event such as an air show, music concert or such like. There is no way that a search engine like Google can index that kind of information that is specific to a particular location for just a short period of time.

What is my conclusion? Product data is extremely complex. It contains lots of relationships, dependencies and semantics. However, it is not everything. The most important element of product data is lifecycle information. Since product data is changing as a result of product development, use, maintenance, etc. systems need to be able to capture this product lifecycle data in a real time to provide a correct data representation for people in manufacturing companies and extended eco-system. It is not a trivial tasks and very interesting problem to crack. PLM software architects and other techies – be aware about complexity of product data lifecycle management. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
11 June, 2013

Recently, I’ve been talking a lot of search paradigm and findability in PLM. In many aspects, web search changed our life....

19 October, 2010

I found an interesting news came from Google yesterday. Google introduced Google Cloud Connect function as part of the new...

19 January, 2019

My recent article Can we liberate product data from PLM vendors and dissolve it with digital thread raised a good number...

17 December, 2017

Recent Forrester Wave report made some turbulence in PLM world. I shared my thoughts in my earlier blog –What I...

8 April, 2020

It is time for roller-coaster emotions. I feel like I’m toggling all the time between several states of mind –...

26 February, 2019

My attention was caught by CIMdata commentary about expanding of 3DEXPERIENCE platform – report SOLIDWORKS World 2019. Navigate here to...

27 August, 2019

Yesterday was my first day at Conx19. Great organization and inspiring speakers. I was reflecting on presentation and discussions. Here...

2 August, 2010

Some very interesting news is coming from Lockheed Martin. Navigate to the following link – Lockheed Martin Launches Open-Source Social Networking...

2 May, 2020

CAD data management is an interesting topic. It was discussed so many times between software vendors, analysts, and customers. As...

Blogroll

To the top