Autonomy

Analysis of enterprise search vendor Autonomy and its products.

November 25, 2012

The future of search

I believe there are two ways search will improve significantly in the future. First, since talking is easier than typing, speech recognition will allow longer and more accurate input strings. Second, search will be informed by much more persistent user information, with search companies having very detailed understanding of searchers. Based on that, I expect:

My reasoning starts from several observations:

In principle, there are two main ways to make search better:

The latter, I think, is where significant future improvement will be found.

Read more

September 1, 2008

How good does e-discovery search need to be?

Two years ago, CEO Mike Lynch of Autonomy tried to persuade me that Autonomy was and would remain dominant in the e-discovery search market because: Read more

July 26, 2007

Event stream processors active in text filtering

OK. I secured permission to actually quote the details on something I’d previously dropped a small hint about — stream processing for text messages. Traditionally, that’s been the province of enterprise search companies. A decade ago, Verity had a kernel group of 6-7 engineers under Phil Nelson. They managed to produce not only a decent search engine, but a search engine “turned on its side” as well. I.e., instead of running one query against a corpus, they could run many queries each against documents as they arrived, one document at a time. Subsequently, the same idea has been implemented by most enterprise search providers, at least those that are serious about the intelligence market.

Well, the event-processing guys are active in that market too. At least StreamBase is. Read more

July 29, 2006

Analyst reports about enterprise search

Gartner and Forrester have high opinions of FAST. Not coincidentally, you can download both those firms’ recent search industry survey reports from almost any page of www.fastsearch.com. Of the two, Forrester’s is both better and more recent.

Summarizing brutally, the big firms’ consensus seems to be:

Forrester is particularly harsh on Convera. Presumably this has much to do with the fact that Convera did not cooperate well with the survey process. I shall not speculate as to which way the causality runs there – but I should note that Convera was quite cooperative with my research last week.

July 23, 2006

Autonomy on text mining

I asked Mike Lynch (Autonomy CEO) about text mining. He responded with an example:

A very well-known company “mines” its incoming emails for signs of trouble, not via any linguistics-driven approach, but just by clustering them. If a cluster changes size anomalously over time, it bears close investigation.

July 23, 2006

Update: Autonomy/Verity merger

I had a couple of very interesting calls with Autonomy last week. One message I got was that they do not want to be pigeonholed in search, which they think on the whole is a primitive way of dealing with “unstructured information.” Nonetheless, my first post based on those calls will indeed focus on text indexing and search. You see, I wrote quite skeptically about the Autonomy/Verity merger when it was announced, and I’d like to amend that with an updated opinion. Autonomy’s claims can be summarized in part by the following: Read more

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