Mike Davis
Starting the year with search
Business and personal users take their existing search tools with all their respective strengths and faults for granted. However, we believe that in 2007 the current status quo will be disrupted by a raft of new products and the respective responses by the established vendors.Comment: On 23 December the London Times published an interview with James Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, in which he reportedly revealed plans to develop an Internet search engine to rival Google. The engine would be based around community input to identify the relevancy of results rather than using algorithms to create page rankings. Such was the excitement about a potential 'Google killer' that by the 27 December and despite the holiday Google's news site had identified 65 articles that referred to the potential product, which had been labelled Wikiasari. By 29 December, and following a more detailed interview with Wales recorded on searchland.com, it emerged that the project was due to start in Q1 2007 and would be based upon the open source products Nutch and Lucene, but the engine would not be called Wikiasari, which is actually the name of the software.The article followed a flurry of announcements at the end of 2006 regarding search technologies and the companies that develop them. As part of its Office 2007 launch Microsoft introduced its SharePoint Server for Search product. In December, IBM announced its 'free' enterprise search tool (see EuroView Daily 13 December 2006) using the Yahoo! interface, which was targeted at smaller organisations that would previously have considered Google or Microsoft. On 1 January 2007 the International Herald Tribune reported on Powerset, a Californian-based company that wants to 'out-Google Google', and quoted that $350 million of venture capital has been invested in Internet search start-ups since 2004. Further announcements are scheduled from both large and medium-sized enterprise software vendors about their enterprise search products in January 2007.Whilst there is undoubtedly a lot of interest in knocking Google off its perch in the Internet search arena, the most powerful message from the reported activity is the potential impact on the enterprise market. As identified by IBM with its product the user interface is key, and to ensure business relevance Google does not use page ranking algorithms in its Search Appliance. In 2007 we can expect to see much more of a cross-over of technologies from Internet to enterprise products and, given the extent and speed of the activity, how we regard the role of search may change before the year is out.
