02.25.06
Search, Search and more Search
It is interesting to see the increasing importance of search plays in enterprise or consumer daily life. With plethora of information everywhere in all format imaginable, not to mention the new creation every day that is growing fast, it is not surprising to see users jump to search before they browse today. In addition to the vertical search engines I covered in my blog before, there are multiple other related search areas I looked at…
- Enterprise Search: There are plenty of technologies in this space, ranging from mature vendors like Verity, Autonomy and Convera, to relatively new vendors such as Endeca. Google has a hardware platform for the enterprise as well. Recent Oracle acquisition of Triplehop is an indication that this space will get more attention.
- Desktop search: Yahoo and google probably got the most visibility in this area. Other vendors such as X1, Copermic, askjeeve are pretty good as well.
- Multimedia Search: As basic text search commoditizes, multimedia search comes into focus. We see a public annoucement from a startup called Truveo which claims that it can search video better than Yahoo google, Altavista, and some other startups like singingfish, blinx etc. The only potential area over existing dominate players such as google probably lies in the accuracy and efficiency of multimedia processing, hopefully these startups have some patents on hand to defend themselves. Another area of advantage may be in real time vs offline processing. One of the companies that AOL partner with is TVEyes which is more real time vs. offline processing, that probably has some value to it
Search is almost an all-or-nothing game. It is unlikely that a person will have multiple desktop search or even web search favorite, as in most of the 80/20 rule, the winner will eventually take 80% (maybe a little less) of the market and leave the 20% search divided among several other players. But I think we are still a long way to maturity in this area….