Category: Search

Thoughts on search technology.

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?

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]