Business Search Viewed by Google

When you hear about the fight opposing Microsoft and Google you would think above all about the search engines. MSN Live Search seeking to grasp market shares from Google and Yahoo! However there is another sector where Google and Microsoft conflict: the business intranet search.

This article speak of a component of knowledge management. This field, dear to me, is very different from the public search engines. It does not aim at inquiring inter-connected text pages but instead documents in many different formats. Moreover, it is not about raw information but often contextualized data. Lastly, ordering files by popularity according to the links pointing at them is meaningless in the magma of company‘s files. On the contrary, relevance of an answer will perhaps be a date, a related subject in an abstract or related in progress projects. Thus, it is clear, even if both sector are about search, the two are quite distinct approach.
This market have been estimated at 13 billion of dollar by Steve Balmer (Microsoft CEO). This better explaining why Kevin Turner (Microsoft Chief Operating Officer) announced in a partners conference “Enterprise search is our business, it’s our house and Google is not going to take that business”. The battle plan is now disclosed and the means are huge knowing that Microsoft spent last year more than 6 billions dollars in R&D which approximate the total sales turnover of Google in the same year.
Let us focus a moment on Google offer , it is about a search engine based on a server which the company can at some level customize. Therefore there is no data outsourcing. It is based on an algorithm said to be very different from the one used to order the Web. With starting price of $30.000, Google solution is far from the free services we are used to. The importance of this activity is highlighted by the presence of a direct link on the very Google’s home page always so neat and hard to reach for new brand.
One of the obstacle in developing these solutions is the frail notoriety that Google has as services supplier to businesses in spite of its public fame. One of Google’s strength seems to be its capacity to establish partnerships with companies which has already a strong expertise in data processing and data mining like with BearingPoint , during last February. The second benefit would be to multiple its sources of income which are currently at 99% obtained form advertising. This being strongly criticized by financial analysts. But as for now, the Google solution (Google Search Appliance), launched 4 years ago, only adds up some 6000 customers counting some big European players which were clumsily provided by Google himself (Orange, Ericsson, Accenture...).
Thus strong competition will prevail, and with the current coming out of Windows Vista, Microsoft recalls us that he is an actor impossible to circumvent for many, many businesses and it can therefore take an ideal position to meet first the enterprise’s needs in term of data management. In addition IBM and Yahoo! have lately announced the launching of a free software dedicated to enterprise search. Everyone want its piece of the cake.
If you use such systems in your company, can you tell us about your feelings on the matter, on a technical level as well as on the economic one.

By Alexandre VERNO

Source: http://www.agoravox.com/article.php3?id_article=5471