Search Unicorns? Nah, Think Search Sasquatches

January 24, 2016

The founder of Salesforce pointed out that some of the stampeding unicorns are going to die. See the frosty thoughts in “Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff Predicts ‘a Lot of Dead Unicorns’ and Cheap Startups to Buy.”

What goes up must come down, right? But the obviousness of the prognostication misses one aspect of the economic snowmageddon.

There are many search sasquatches which have been struggling to survive in the Lucene/Solr landscape. These outfits share some characteristics:

Histories of low or no profits and revenue challenges
Fuzzy positioning about what their information access technology does
Difficulties making clear why proprietary technology is better than open source search technology
A dependence on venture funding to keep the lights on and the parking lots paved.

Who are some of the proprietary vendors living in the suburbs of unicorn land?

Examples which an intrepid sasquatch hunter might consider fair game are:

Attivio, a system based on inspirations from Fast Search & Transfer
BA Insight, a Microsoft centric information access system
Coveo, a search system once anchored in Microsoft technology
EasyAsk, proprietary natural language processing. The company has used crowd funding to raise some cash.
MarkLogic, once considered a unicorn, and now trying to find new revenue as the firm’s original market of publishing faces its own problems
Sinequa, one of the interesting French search vendors
X1, a search and discovery outfit with an interesting interface

There are others as well, but few North Americans know about Exabyte, Intrafind, SRCH2, and their ilk.

If Marc Benioff is correct, the information access ecosystem will suffer the type of implosion that occurs when Brazilians chop down the rain forest. Reforestation does occur, but it may deliver a radically different ecological environment. Consultants and installations of Lucene/Solr might be more friendly than the venture capital firms who want their money back.

What is the going rate for the pelt of a search sasquatch?

Stephen E Arnold, January 24, 2016

Which unicorns and search sasquatches will survive? Where is Darwin when one needs him?

Stephen E Arnold, January 24, 2016

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Financial, News, Search

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.