Allison Linn at the AP reports that Microsoft will start integrating desktop and intranet search results with their internet web search.
From the initial reports, the new Microsoft product sounds very similar to Google Desktop Search, which nicely integrates search results from your desktop with all of your web searches.
Longer term, this likely is the beginning of a Microsoft strategy to win the search war by leveraging their control of the desktop. For more on that, see my earlier post, "Using the desktop to improve search".
[Found on Findory]
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the only problem here is that enterprise search isn't owned by any one vendor, certainly not Microsoft. Autonomy is probably the single biggest standalone, followed by Fast. Microsoft might have more deployments based on their stuff being integrated into SharePoint and being low-cost. but people who really care about intranet search have licensed Autonomy, Ultraseek, (owned by Verity for some time), Verity (now owned by Autonomy), FAST, or another similar engine. Google is getting some good traction for basic search projects, but their closed-box approach usually means they get kicked out of the higher-end RFPs. theres a lot of niche players too. and once one of these things is in there its hard to get it out. you couldn't pay some customers to switch.
also, the whole internet + intranet combination has been tried and failed a few times by Ask, Altavista among others. its not a real compelling story for customers; the feature set between internet and intranet search is pretty divergent, or at least the requirements people look at when purchasing.
i'd say this would work best by offering some APIs that intranet search can use to enhance enterprise search. instead of trying to figure out how to slap ads in front of users, first focus on how to ENHANCE intranet search. maps APIs, etc. could add some value in some instances. also, I've seen a fair amount of enterprise search projects that want to index the public web for various reasons. something along the Alexa API could be used to outsource portions of an index. basically, let the enterprise build vertical search engines using a toolkit provided by the big internet search indexes.
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