Search: Can new products change the status quo?

While Internet-based search is dominated by Google, Enterprise search has no one clear leader.  FAST, Autonomy and Endeca all offer strong performances.  But this space is moving at a rapid pace.  A number of announcements over the past month show that many vendors are vying for positions in this lucrative technology. 

Money continues to flow into search startups.  The Northern Venture Capital Association reports that $350 million has been spent since 2004 in funding 79 new startups that are targeting some aspect of Internet Search.  But as of November 2006, of these new ventures, none had more than a 1% share of the Internet search market.  Clearly breaking into this market is hard to do.  Just ask Microsoft.

Over the holidays there was also news about a new search engine that targeted Google planned by James Wales, founder of the Wikipedia project.  The new project has been dubbed Wikiasari, a combination of wiki, the Hawaiian word for quick, and asari, Japanese for a ‘rummaging search’.  The idea of Wikiasari is to leverage Open Source technology tools like Nutch and Lucene and to blend in community participation to directly influence the relevancy of the search results.  Amazon is involved in some of the funding behind the project.

On January 1st, the New York Times ran an article about a company called PowerSet which also targets Google and seeks to beat them by creating unique natural language processing algorithms. 

And Barry Diller, CEO of $11 Billion IAC/InterActive, is also reportedly trying to one-up Google with investments in the competing Ask.com search engine, although running at a distant fifth place in market share behind Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and AOL.

There have been many announcements related to enterprise search.  One trend in the activity is to provide unified Internet/Enterprise search.  Google announced an update of their Enterprise Search applicance with new features before the end of January.

In mid-December, IBM and Yahoo! announced a ‘free’ Internet/Enterprise search product based on the Yahoo! UI that targets departments and enterprises for finding information in both the organization or on the web.  The technology is based on IBM’s Open Source OmniFind software and uses the Open Source Lucene product.  The enterprise search component is limited to 500,000 documents.

Not to be overlooked is some of the work that Microsoft is doing.  They continue to trail, but with new leadership and lot of cash, they may be able to turn things around.  With the introduction of SharePoint 2007, Microsoft introduced their Sharepoint Server for Search, capable of Internet/Enterprise search.

The search market is changing, but whether new leaders will emerge is yet to be seen.