There can be little doubt that Web search has evolved way beyond what it was in the 1990’s. But how will the changes that have taken place affect all of us as other new search concepts begin to take hold?

“Search” is all the rage lately with customers, software providers, and investors. For investors, the attraction is obvious: Google’s wildly successful initial Public Offering (IPO) and its potential for changing the software game.

The application needs are disparate and equally important (see Figure 1), yet, by and large, customers are looking for single platforms to support search capabilities across their business. In our recent survey on knowledge management spending, 71% of respondents were seeking a single platform for many different types of search applications geared toward addressing business issues as diverse as compliance and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). For a point of reference, the same study of 400 IT decision-makers shows that customers are considerably less likely to seek standards for Enterprise Content Management (ECM—57%), portal frameworks (52%), and collaboration platforms (55%). [Read the rest]

[tags]initial public offering,investors,enterprise content management,product lifecycle management,collaboration platforms,portal frameworks[/tags]