There are in fact more direct competitors in the fields.
PLS (still a private company) is a pretty strong one.
And don't forget that Lycos, Excite, Infoseek, and AltaVista all
are selling search engines for text retrieval.
Try have a look at Yahoo's category on text retrieval companies
and you'll find even more.
yahoo.com
And, Microsoft's index server can be a big threat in the long run, especially when packaged with internet information servers.
To have a feel of the competition, just go to a few big information
providers (Times, Wall Street Journal, to name a few) and try to
find out whose search engine they are using.
However, with the emerging of intranet and world-wide web, the need for search engines -- the essential piece to let users find the documents they're looking for -- is going stronger and stronger.
A few players should survive and I believe Verity will be one of them.
Technically, an inversed-index text retrieval search engine is not a difficult software to write. Licensing a few linguistic tools from
other places, a few good software engineers can put out a nice product
in a few months. The entry barrier is in fact pretty low.
It's marketing and alliance that make a company stand out in this field.
Just my 2c.
GT |
