February 1st, 2008 Curt Monash
As I write this, Microsoft has just announced an offer to acquire Yahoo. Early responses from the likes of Danny Sullivan, Henry Blodget, the Download Squad, TechCrunch, Raven SEO, Mashable, and others seem to boil down to:
- Wow.
- Both sides needed it.
- Yahoo wasn’t going anywhere fast on its own.
- Microsoft wasn’t going anywhere fast in search on its own.
- This may be enough critical mass to matter.
- Conference call at 8:30 am
I’ll try to be a bit more analytical than that, but this is still going to be quick. Assuming the deal goes through:
- Microsoft will recombine both parts of the old FAST/alltheweb.com Therefore, Microsoft will be able to use the same technology for web and enterprise search, to the extent that such commonality makes sense.
- I’d expect Microsoft to try to differentiate its technology via faceted/structured search. That’s a FAST strength.
- The old FAST search-as-BI dream might become pretty appealing to Microsoft/Yahoo.
- In a non-search point, Microsoft is strong in games and Yahoo is strong in fantasy sports. Look for some synergies.
- There sure would be a whole lot of non-Windows technology inside Microsoft.
Basically, Microsoft is a company that’s a lot more sophisticated in its thinking about user interfaces and experiences than Yahoo is. That’s where the really interesting competitive innovation would be most likely to occur.
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Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Yahoo, search
Posted in Enterprise search, FAST, Microsoft and Windows Live Search, Search and text storage, Structured search | 5 Comments »
January 8th, 2008 Curt Monash
Following up on my prior posts about Microsoft’s impending acquisition of FAST, they’ve now had the conference call. By custom and indeed antitrust law, such calls are very light on content. But here are a few tidbits and takeaways, all from Jeff Raikes of Microsoft:
- Jeff talked solely about FAST as adding to enterprise search, and rightly contrasted that with web search.
- However, he deflected questions about web search with “We aren’t talking about that much detail right now” rather than with a firm “Well, we aren’t allowed to use FAST that way.”
- Specifically, enterprise search is all about integration with SharePoint (portal).
- Jeff said Microsoft’s current search could handle millions or maybe tens of millions of documents, but thought there was demand for FAST’s ability to handle billions.
- He positioned FAST as an application development platform, giving an example of structured search (the actual word was “pivot”) in consumer electronics. … Well, at least he’s looking in the right direction.
Technorati Tags: SharePoint, Microsoft, search
Posted in Enterprise search, FAST, Microsoft and Windows Live Search, Search and text storage, Structured search | No Comments »
December 2nd, 2007 Curt Monash
Danny Sullivan thinks blended vertical search — which he’s calling Search 3.0 — is a game changer. (In this context, “vertical” search denotes alternate result types such as video, image, map coordinates, or product listings.) In saying that, he’s focused on search marketers, who now have a lot more ways to try to get their messages onto Google searchers’ top result pages. But I presume what he’s really saying is that there will be a feedback effect — if Google tells all web searchers about videos and product listings, then internet marketers will be more motivated to post videos and product listings, and hence there will be more interesting choices of videos and product listings — which Google will naturally wind up featuring more prominently in its search results. And so on.
Given the Youtube explosion, I find it hard to argue with his claim.
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Posted in Google, Search and text storage, Search engine optimization (SEO), Specialized search engines, Structured search | No Comments »
May 1st, 2007 Curt Monash
The folks at Progress claim huge conversion rate benefits to EasyAsk, although unfortunately so far I’ve been unable to drill down and see what those numbers really mean. (Flagship customer = Land’s End.) Baynote makes more modest but still large claims. (Flagship customer = no big names that I’m aware of.) Endeca is clearly the market leader. (Flagship customers = Wal-Mart, Home Depot.) Mercado and Inquira are important players, at least in certain verticals.
I think it’s safe to say that e-commerce site navigation aids constitute a really important product category.
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Posted in Baynote, Endeca, InQuira, Mercado, Progress and EasyAsk, Search and text storage, Structured search | No Comments »
February 15th, 2007 Curt Monash
InQuira and Mercado both have broadened their marketing pitches beyond their traditional specialties of structured search for e-commerce. Even so, it’s well worth talking about those search technologies, which offer features and precision that you just don’t get from generic search engines. There’s a lot going on in these rather cool products.
In broad outline, Mercado and InQuira each combine three basic search approaches:
- Generic text indexing.
- Augmentation via an ontology.
- A rules engine that helps the site owner determine which results and responses are shown under various circumstances.
Of the two, InQuira seems to have the more sophisticated ontology. Indeed, the not-wholly-absurd claim is that InQuira does natural-language processing (NLP). Both vendors incorporate user information in deciding which search results to show, in ways that may be harbingers of what generic search engines like Google and Yahoo will do down the road.
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Posted in InQuira, Mercado, Natural language processing (NLP), Ontologies and context identification, Search and text storage, Structured search | 2 Comments »