Summer Search Rumor Round Up
July 26, 2010
The addled goose has been preoccupied with some new projects. In the course of running around and honking, he has heard some rumors. The goose wants to be clear. He is not sure if these rumors are 100 percent rock solid. He does want to capture them before the mushy information slips away:
Source: http://oneyearbibleimages.com/rumors.gif
First, the goose heard that there will be some turnover at Microsoft Fast. The author of some of the posts in the Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog may be leaving for greener pastures. You can check out the blog at this link. What does this tell the goose? More flip flopping at Microsoft? Not sure. Any outfit that pays $1.2 billion for software that comes with its own police investigation is probably an outfit that would scare the addled goose to death. The blog is updated irregularly with such write ups as “Crawling Case Sensitive Repositories Using SharePoint Server 2010” and “SharePoint 2010 Search ‘Dogfood’ Part 3 – Query Performance Optimization.” Ah, the new problem of upper and lower case and the ever present dog food regarding performance. I thought Windows most recent software ran as fast as a jack rabbit. Guess not.
Second, a number of traditional search vendors are poking around for semantic technology. The notion that key words don’t work particularly well seems to be gaining traction. The problem is that some of the high profile outfits have been snapped up. For example, Powerset fell into the Microsoft maw and Radar Networks was gobbled by Paul Allen’s love child, Evri. Now the stampede is on. The problem is that the pickings seem to be slim, a bit like the t shirts after a sale at the Wal-Mart up the road from the goose pond here in Harrods’s Creek. For some lucky semantic startups, Christmas could come early this year. Anyone hear, a sound like “hack, hack”. Oh, that must be short for Hakia. You never know.
Third, performance may have forced a change at HMV.co.uk in merrie olde England. Dieselpoint was the incumbent. I heard that Dieselpoint is on the look out for partners and investors. The addled goose tried to interview the founder of the company but a clever PR person sidelined the goose and shunted him to the drainage ditch that runs through Blue Island, Illinois. Will Dieselpoint land the big bucks as Palantir did.
Fourth, the goose heard that a trio of Microsoft certified partners with snap in SharePoint search components were looking for greener pastures. What seems to be happening is that the easy sales have dried up since Microsoft started its current round of partner cheerleading. The words are there, but the sales are not. Microsoft seems to want the money to flow to itself and not its partners. Who is affected? The goose cannot name names without invoking the wrath of Redmond and a pride of PR people who insist that their clients are knocking the socks off the competition. However, does the enterprise need a half dozen companies pitching metatagging to SharePoint licensees? I think not. If sales don’t pick up, the search engine death watch list will pick up a few new entries before the leaves fall. Vendors in the US, Denmark, Germany, Austria, and Canada are likely to watching Beyond Search’s death watch list. Remember Convera? It spawned Search Technologies. Remember the pre Microsoft Fast? It spawned Comperio? When a search engine goes away, the azurini flower.
Fifth, what’s happened to the Oracle killers? I lost track of Speed of Mind years ago. There was a start up with a whiz bang method of indexing databases. I haven’t heard much about killing Oracle lately. In fact, stodgy old Oracle is once again poking around for search and content processing technology according to one highly unreliable source. With SES11g now available to Oracle database administrators, perhaps the time is right to put some wood behind a 21st century search solution.
If you want to complain about one of these rumors, use the comments section of this blog. Alternatively, contact one of the azurini outfits and get “real” verification. Some of their consultants use this blog as training material for the consultants whom you compensate. No rumor this. Fact.
Stephen E Arnold, July 26, 2010
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