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Maybe it is just me, but for home users, is a tool like this really necessary?

Personally, I find Windows Search very inadequate. Ever tried to search for text within files that are not .txt, .doc, .rtf, etc? Files other than those which Windows knows to contain text and how to interpret them?

It does not find text that is there.

Try associating that file type with Notepad and... it still does not find the text.

I have had to resort to ISYS for search results that I can trust. Windows Search has failed me far too often (mostly because I forget the limitations).

Thankfully, I spend most of my time in OpenBSD and NetBSD so I don't have a similar problem there.

The particular method of arranging image files described, including creation of mirroring text files, defaulting to sorting by file creation date if there's no mirroring text file, is a pretty exact description of what has been performed for many years, at least since the DOS 3.1X version of the Isys Desktop search engine, i.e., since 1991 when I first used it. And given how much development work Microsoft has been doing on local computer and network search engines, it's bloody unlikely Microsoft doesn't know about it.

You're missing by far the biggest intranet vendors. Verity is the king of this market, and have been since the mid-90s. They get a lot of mileage out of their OEM sales; it sounds simpler to a company if they hear that they "already have Verity" within Documentum or Cold Fusion or whatever.

It'll be very interesting to see what they do with the Inktomi purchase. (They bought the productized search before Yahoo snarfed up the external services.) Inktomi is IMHO the best intranet search engine right now. (I believe Verity is dropping the Inktomi name and is calling the tool Ultraseek, which goes back to Inktomi's acquisition of Intelliseek.) The purchase gave Verity yet another leg up with enterprise search, it'll be interesting to see if they leverage the technology or if they see this more as a marketing move.

Google is obviously a big player here too. Don't need to evangelize to the /. crowd on that. However Gooogle still has a way to go in understanding how to tackle enterprise search.

Autonomy is another big player in the enterprise, though I am less familiar with their tools.

Other interesting enterprise search vendors include FAST, Isys, and Divine/Northern Light (yes they're still around). Teoma/Ask Jeeves could get there if they productize their search tool. Lots of interesting approaches there but nobody who's quite moved up into the first tier.

Anyway, it's a messy space even with all the consolidation above. I have no idea whether Ovation will keep up their enterprise sales effort or not; I suppose it depends on how profitable that part of the business is. Guess we'll find out...

We find there's plenty of people who can talk the talk, but not that many who can walk the walk. After all, if you can't cut code fluently under pressure, then what real use are you where the rubber meets the road </cliche>.

We find there's plenty of people who can talk the talk, but not that many who can walk the walk. After all, if you can't cut code fluently under pressure, then what real use are you where the rubber meets the road </cliche>.

Think of the informal knowledge embodied in the emails sent and received, attachments, spreadsheets, favorite websites, your colleagues documents, as well as SQL databases and the like. There simply is no suitably shaped container that you can put amorphous knowledge into. It defies structure, and XML is no answer.

Useful knowledge is of a pervasive nature. It infuses through everything, and often the really useful bits are where you least expect it, so therefore attempting to design a structure, a priori, to hold it is always doomed to failure.

The key here is polymorphic searching of both structured and unstructured data without distinction. That's where products such as ISYS earn their salt. The hard part is in convincing the blissfully unaware that knowledge is being wasted in the first place.

The other key concept is value. Large result lists are less useful than small, high-quality result lists. Everybody knows this from using Google and getting back 198,000 hits. In the old CB radio days, it was called a squelch knob. Search engines that just give you large amounts of static do you a dis-service. Useful results are small and targeted.