Autonomy + Verity — so what?
On some levels, the Autonomy/Verity merger makes total sense. The text search industry now has an unquestionably dominant vendor of shelfware. Somewhat less snarkily, I could say that it has a dominant OEM vendor of search technology. And while Verity’s management team has never recovered from the dizzying cycles of turnover in the 1990s, Autonomy’s obviously was quite effective. However, I see no obvious reason to believe that combined company will actually ship good products, or ones that lead to fundamentally greater adoption for enterprise search than the fairly marginal role it plays today.
Verity and Autonomy represent different philosophies of text search — Boolean vs. concept-based, basically. Neither works very well on its own, whether in the enterprise or on the web, with concept-based being the weaker of the two. That’s why Altavista et al. failed, and Excite failed yet more completely. It’s why Verity’s text search is generally more respected, and has more hardcore users, than Autonomy’s. (Being a vastly older company than Autonomy helps a lot too, of course.)
I hope that the merged company will soon introduce some new and/or synthesized approaches to search, significantly improving the overall quality of available products. If anybody has the resources and motivation, it will. The recent boom in text data mining, and the general increase of seriousness about ontologies, at least raises the possibility that concept-oriented search will evolve into something significantly useful. But I’m not holding my breath.
| Categories: Enterprise search, Ontologies, Search engines | 4 Comments |