European Search Vendors Additions
September 18, 2009
Happy quacks to the readers who sent in suggestions for the European search vendor table. I do know about ZyLAB. My recollection is that this company is owned by a firm in the Netherlands, but the technology was acquired from a US firm. The same is true of Ixquick, now owned by a company in Europe, maybe Belgium. Ixquick is on my radar because it is one of the search systems that does not store the user’s IP address. A small step in the right direction, but the Adobe acquisitions of Omniture is a long jump in the other direction. Yes, those wonderful Flash cookies. At any rate, I am not including ZyLAB or Ixquick.com in the European search vendor list.
I have, however, added these four companies to the table which we will post on the ArnoldIT.com Web site in the near future.
| Vendor | Function | Opinion |
| Neofonie | Vertical search | Founded in the late 1990s, created Fireball.de |
| Ontoprise GmbH | Semantic search | The firm’s semantic Web infrastructure product, OntoBroker, is at Version 5.3 |
| PolySpot | Enterprise search with workflow | Now at Version 4.8, search, work flow, and faceted navigation |
| Sinequa | Enterprise search with workflow | Now at Version 7, the system includes linguistic tools |
Two of these companies were “new” to me, and I have little information in my Overflight system about these search systems. We will update our crawl list to correct this oversight. Two firms—PolySpot and Sinequa—are in our system. Omitting them was an error on my part.
What strikes me as unusual is that most of the search vendors in the Overflight system get very little coverage in the news sources I monitor. I did some Web site traffic look ups, and I discovered that most of the vendors’ Web sites get very little traffic as well.
Little wonder that the various “awards”, “quadrants”, and “waves” are potential gold mines for the azure chip consultants who operate these services. Marketing, not broad news coverage or even technology, seems to be the name of the game in enterprise search. I am also struck by the number of companies working to build scalable revenues in what is a tough market sector.
Stephen Arnold, September 18, 2009
Comments
3 Responses to “European Search Vendors Additions”
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Hi Arnold,
seems like you forget to mention exorbyte.
Regards
Heiner
Heiner,
You are correct. I keep forgetting that outfit. I will add the company to the table. I have info about the firm, but I never think about the company. My myopia at work.
Stephen Arnold, September 20, 2009
[…] not updated my list of European search vendors recently. Yep, on the to do list. The old list is at http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/2009/09/18/european-search-vendors-additions/. I see that I need to add SurfRay, Fabasoft, Forward Search, and Exalead […]