Search expands beyond Web boundaries

After a sharp consolidation, the enterprise search market is showing signs of life. Players including Verity, Endeca Technologies, Inxight, and Kanisa are touting information-retrieval capabilities for the enterprise, spanning customer-facing, self-service applications to file systems, repositories, and applications.

Verity this week will unwrap Ultraseek 5.1 search offering, which the company acquired from Inktomi late last year. The new version features enhanced reporting tools, streamlined administration, and bolstered analytics.

Despite rapid market consolidation and less direct stand-alone sales, the market for enterprise search continues to grow, primarily as a component of other applications, according to Rob Lancaster, senior analyst at The Yankee Group in Boston. “[Search] is almost always integrated into another software application like content management or portal,” he said.

This trend is likely to continue, Lancaster said, yielding a category of search-derivative applications in which core search functions such as indexing, categorization, and taxonomy creation are applied to different business processes.

In addition, The Yankee Group reports that the now distinct areas of Web site search and behind-the-firewall data search will eventually converge.

The search landscape has changed dramatically in the past year, with consolidation bringing new players to the forefront. In addition to Verity’s purchase of Inktomi’s enterprise technology, last month Oslo, Norway-based Fast Search & Transfer acquired AltaVista’s enterprise search business, and customer-service application vendor Kanisa earlier this month completed its acquisition of the enterprise search business from Ask Jeeves.

The Jeeves technology, now called Site Search, broadens Kanisa’s call-center and problem-resolution applications with natural language processing, analytics, and integration capabilities, according to Benjamin Kaplan, vice president of marketing at Kanisa in Cupertino, Calif. Site Search is a separate product offering now, but down the road the company plans to stitch the search capabilities into its other applications, he said.

Inxight last week rolled out ThingFinder 3.5, its entity-extraction software designed to quickly retrieve the most important information in large volumes of text, according to David Spenhoff, vice president of marketing at Inxight in Sunnyvale, Calif. Version 3.5 includes a new relevancy-ranking algorithm that helps users determine how relevant a specific entity is within the context of a document.

Enterprise search is moving beyond the keyword approach toward information discovery, which expands the toolset to include taxonomies, classification, entity extraction, and data visualization, Spenhoff said. “Information discovery helps people find what they didn’t know was is in the data. With discovery you [can] see relationships between related concepts.”

Meanwhile, Cambridge, Mass.-based Endeca plans to add categorization capabilities to its guided navigation technology, allowing end-users to navigate interactively based on attributes in the data, said Endeca’s President and COO Jim Baum.