Looks like Microsoft is going to acquire search vendor FAST. Read CMSWatch coverage here and John Newton’s here.
Category: Search
Thoughts on search technology.
Up-coming AIIM webinars on search, BPM
AIIM webinars can be a mixed bag but two are coming up that might be worthwhile: “Redefining Enterprise Search”, sponsored by FAST on 4/26 and “BPM: When is Workflow Not Enough”, sponsored by Doculabs on 5/10. Register for both online at http://www.aiim.org/webinars.
Documentum ECI can now call Google desktop
EMC Documentum ECI, a federated search technology, has added the ability to search Google Desktop. EMC press release.
Trends: Chill wind continues to blow for FAST
Alfresco, Plone make EContent 100
EContent Magazine has posted the EContent 100, an annual list of “…companies that matter most in the digital content industry”.
Notable newcomers include open source ECM and Portal platforms Alfresco and Plone. Wiki software provider, SocialText, returns for a second year.
EMC Software (Documentum), a long-time EContent 100 stalwart, having appeared every year since 2001, did not make the 2005 list, but Autonomy, now with a three-peat, did.
“Our goal was to be sure that those who make the list again and again don’t do so out of habit or mindshare, but rather because they continue to innovate and deliver products and services that further the evolution of digital content,” said Michelle Manafy, Editor of EContent magazine.
Got clarification on the “Free Google Mini” offer
I recently got some clarification from Google on their offer of a free Google Mini Search Appliance. If you buy the regular Google Search Appliance they’ll give you a free Mini. The idea is that you might use the Search Appliance for your intranet and your free Mini for your internet site. If that doesn’t appeal to you they’ll knock the $3k off the cost of your Search Appliance.
If you do get a Mini, make sure you are up-to-date on patches. eWeek is reporting a security flaw in the device.
Google Goes after Verity Customers
Note the interesting tidbit, “…on Tuesday Google began giving away its least expensive Google corporate search product, its Mini, to new Google Enterprise customers…” I’m looking into the details. The price on the Mini has fallen to $2995 but free doesn’t seem likely.
Google Goes after Verity Customers
Of course, Google could smell blood in the water and what better way to give a boost to its customer base than to give away its cheapest appliance?
Search IBM Information Integrator from Google
This is a good example of a company taking advantage of a client that gets deployed virally rather than by the IT department…
Autonomy to Buy U.S. Software Firm Verity
Wow. With FAST apparently doing well and Google continuing to make inroads with their enterprise offering I guess something like this was inevitable.
Autonomy to Buy U.S. Software Firm Verity
Still, it is always a head-turner when two previously fierce competitors hook up.
Autonomy singing same old song
Autonomy continues to try to justify concept search versus keyword search.
“Say I’m interested in the effect of oil pollution on the penguin population of Alaska. Although that’s the idea someone is looking for they will walk up to a search engine and just type ‘penguin’.”
“They would never walk up to a librarian and just say ‘penguin’. And that’s the Google effect. We’ve been trained to assume the search engine is dumb and that takes a little un-training in enterprise.”
The tough part is that a lot of people use Google throughout the day. If I am jumping back-and-forth between Google and an Autonomy-powered portal, for instance, how realistic is it to expect me to shift gears between keyword and concept search? I have seen the power of concept-based searching and Autonomy, specifically, but the “un-training” is much easier said than done.
“Search is going to become a lot more than typing words into a box. It’s going to become about alerting. This has just happened, or this has just happened in your Malaysia office or we’re getting an awful lot of complaints coming into the call centre about this problem with the product,” said Lynch.
I agree with this as well. Maybe Autonomy should give up on user-executed search in the Enterprise and focus on behind-the-scenes alerting, clustering, and mining of unstructured data.
Quotes are from: Interview: Mike Lynch, founder of Autonomy. Silicon.com Sep 19 2005 8:36PM GMT [Moreover Technologies – Knowledge management news]