Archive for the ‘Search Watch’ Category

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Caroline Abrahamsson

Autonomy extends its business model with compliance

January 28 - 2009 | Caroline Abrahamsson

On January 22:nd, Interwoven entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by Autonomy, for a total transaction value of approximately $775 million.

Ever since Microsoft’s acquisition of FAST there have been quite a few discussions in blogs and forums whether any of the giants such as Oracle, IBM or even Google would make an attractive offer for Autonomy. The company has, during the last few years, always been a clear leading candidate within Enterprise Search and its range of offerings within Multimedia, Digital Asset Management and Information management solutions has made the customer base grow faster than ever.

However, the acquisition of Interwoven shows that Autonomy is serious when it comes to growing on its own premises. The product portfolio now contains a strong offering for legal and compliance and Autonomy has, once more, proven that they prefer to extend and strengthen their business model.

According to the press release the companies ‘share a vision to fundamentally change the way organizations discover, analyze and manage information’.
Beyond the buzzwords, there seems to be a clear vision and it will be interesting to see how this affects Enterprise Search in general and Autonomys future direction in particular.

Caroline Abrahamsson

Information Discovery: Search-in-page

September 28 - 2008 | Caroline Abrahamsson

Sometimes the users know exactly what they are looking for, sometimes they are just looking to discover new areas. When it comes to information discovery, a plain, one dimensional result list is not the most suitable tool. (more…)

Caroline Abrahamsson

A strategic approach to search

June 23 - 2008 | Caroline Abrahamsson

The other week I attended ”From business to buttons” a yearly conference about usability and ‘designing for effect’ held in Malmö. Maria from Findwise was there to talk about ‘search driven design – or why can’t or intranet be more like Google?’, while I had the privilege to walk around talking to attendees about search.
The conference gathered people from a broad range of industries such as telecom, banking, retail etc, but what struck me the most was that no matter how different their business was, their challenges when it came to Enterprise Search where like peas in a pod. The employees just want to find the information they need to do their job in an efficient way. Preferably by typing a simple keyword and get accurate results in a Google-stylish way. Many companies have made investments in Enterprise Search platforms, hoping that this will magically increase findability.

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Maria Johansson

Designing for Search at Business to Buttons

June 8 - 2008 | Maria Johansson

I read an interesting interview where Peter Morville interviewed Luke Wroblewski about Search Patterns. They mentioned some search patterns:
Query Refinement. Most users won’t refine pre-query. They don’t know the size and range of the index. But they will refine post-query, and it provides tremendous value.

Search Assistance. Studies show a correlation between the number of words in the query and satisfaction with results. Search Assist improves query richness. Tips (e.g., did you mean?) improve confidence and suggestions (e.g., related concepts) can shift users into exploratory mode.

Layout. For query refinement tools, we found the right rail is the least discoverable. The top is the most obvious, but suggestions can get in the way of results. That’s why search assist is on top but hidden by default. Other examples include Local and Shopping.

Vertical Search. In verticals such as News and Games, we’ve found that people are fine with two search boxes, one for the vertical and one for web search. In each vertical, we’re selectively exposing structured metadata (e.g., pricing in Autos) to support the decision making process.

It’s always nice when other companies corroborate our findings and experiences.

If you want to know more about these topics and about designing good search experiences come and listen to us talk at Business to Buttons in Malmö. There will be something for the expert as well as those new to search technology. You can also come and talk to us in our monter during the breaks. Hope to see you there!

Caroline Abrahamsson

Microsoft is opening its wallet for search

February 3 - 2008 | Caroline Abrahamsson

Three weeks after making a $1.2 billion bid for FAST search & Transfer Microsoft announces that they make a $44.6 billion offer to buy Yahoo. So far it‘s only an offer which Yahoo’s board and stockholders are considering but, to conclude, Microsoft is serious about going into strategic search markets.

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Mattias Brunnert

Microsoft bids for Fast

January 8 - 2008 | Mattias Brunnert

In a recent press release Microsoft has announced an offer to acquire Fast Search and Transfer.
At Findwise we are of course excited about this, as it clearly shows how the world’s leading software vendor has understood the importance of search to the modern enterprise. We are also convinced that the result will be an excellent merger between technical as well as market knowledge of both parties. Since Findwise has a close partnership with Fast and Microsoft you can be sure that we will continue to deliver cutting edge solutions in the future.

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Caroline Abrahamsson

Basic enterprise search is commodity – let’s go further! Trends for 2008

December 31 - 2007 | Caroline Abrahamsson

So looking ahead, what are the trends for enterprise search 2008?
Well, we have already been talking about Microsoft and IBM and there are a few other vendors (such as Google and Oracle) that have presented ways to develop their enterprise search solutions (looking at clustering, categorisation, taxonomies, entity extraction, visualisation etc.). To conclude: the simple search box is soon commodity – a search solution for enterprises has to go beyond this.

As a result, experts believe that 2008 will become a year with stronger cooperation and more strategic differentiation among the leading vendors. (more…)

Caroline Abrahamsson

Basic enterprise search is commodity – let’s go further! Conclusions of trends 2007

December 31 - 2007 | Caroline Abrahamsson

Looking back at the search trends that were predicted for 2007 one can conclude that many of the larger research institutes, such as Forrester and Gartner, made a great forecast.

2007 was supposed to raise the question of 2.0 for search technology within the companies (and it seems like wikis, blogs and collaborative tools was all that we heard about for some months). Further on, there was a discussion of integration with business tools, such as BI and search, to create more powerful ways to extract critical data from several sources. The fact that IBM bought Cognos and FAST Radar says something about what we can expect in the future.

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Caroline Abrahamsson

New challenges and leaders in the segment of Enterprise Search 2007

September 16 - 2007 | Caroline Abrahamsson

The yearly magic quadrant for Information Access Technology from Gartner has become an important way to evaluate the vendors in Enterprise Search business. The result is presented in a matrix measuring the different players by ability to execute (product, overall viability, customer experience etc.) and the completeness of their vision (offering strategy, innovation etc.). The vendors are then positioned as niche players (a rather crowded spot), visionaries, challengers and leaders.

For the last couple of years the upper right corner, which includes the leaders, has been a yearly fight between FAST Search & Transfer, Autonomy, Verity (which was bought by Autonomy in 2005) and Endeca.

However, the magic quadrant for 2007 shows that there is a substantial change in the market and two new leaders as well as two new large vendors on the challenging spot are represented. (more…)

Mattias Brunnert

Search is fun

August 23 - 2007 | Mattias Brunnert

Luckily, search is not all finding critical business information, it also is the ticket to finding new enjoyments. Recently Yahoo has launched a new audio search that lets you search multiple music libraries, including for example iTunes, containing millions of songs. In the search result you can see who provided the song and also listen to a free 30- second clip. (more…)

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