Endeca Still Pitching Guided Search to Solve 'Long Tail' Problem

Steve Papa, founder of Endeca, is still pitching guided navigation as a solution to the "long-tail" problem (at this years' Search Engine Meeting). You know, Google's 1-100 of about 72 million inherently buries good stuff down at hit number 71,567,567. "Google's great, don't get me wrong," Papa predictably said. "but..." there's something better, he implied.

He's not really convincing me how their guided navigation can be used as a general search tool. I'm convinced it works well within a (relatively) small database such as a Netflix-type library of DVDs.

I think I agree that it CAN be used in general search, however, it seems you need structured metadata across the documents to do it well.