The Open Source Search Specialists
We’ve now completely redesigned the Flax website – we hope you like it. We’ve tried to focus more on explaining exactly what we do and how the Flax open source search platform might be able to help your business.
Of course, there are sure to be teething problems – if you find anything that doesn’t work do let us know!
News International have announced they will be charging for access to their Times and Sunday Times newspaper websites within a few months. At the same time we have the announcement that the Independent newspaper is to be bought by a Russian oligarch, and may end up as a free publication. This divergence of business models is interesting, but what concerns us at Flax is how technology will help newspaper websites differentiate themselves.
The NLA’s ClipShare and ClipSearch services, which are powered by Flax, are good models for monetizing newspaper content, and are already in use at some of the U.K.’s largest publishers. If you need to quickly find a particular story, see related articles and grasp an overview of coverage you need scalable, highly accurate search technology. Users have been conditioned to expect search to ‘just work’, and they simply won’t pay for anything that doesn’t come up to scratch.
Last week we heard from various sources that Microsoft had announced they would only be continuing to develop its recently acquired FAST Search technology on Windows. This had long been feared by some in the sector, and it must be worrying for existing customers.
Platform choice can be a key issue for those looking to implement advanced search, as there may be significant existing in-house expertise and investment in a particular platform. Our Flax solution works just as well on Windows, Linux or Solaris. It’s sad to see such a powerful technology as FAST become so narrow in focus, but it’s not particularly surprising after the Microsoft acquisition.
UPDATE: more coverage on this from The Register
A new year, and a chance to think about what might happen in the world of enterprise search over the next twelve months. I’ll make a stab at some predictions:
You’re welcome to take any of these with a generous pinch of salt!
Back at Online 2009 on Thursday, to take part in the closing panel: “Cloud Computing, Open Source and Semantics: Content and Search Predictions”, moderated by Stephen Arnold. We only touched on four of the ten controversial themes Stephen had prepared: we talked a lot about how ‘Google pressure’ will affect the market, how XML isn’t necessarily the universal panacea for representing data, on the growth of rich media and the challenges it presents and finally on security. Some great questions from the floor as well, thanks to all who came and the organisers and Stephen for inviting us. I wish we’d had more time!
I didn’t agree with Stephen’s main point that Google will crush us all – I think the battles between Google and Microsoft (and Google and everyone else) are a distraction. While they’re fighting it out the rest of us can get on with developing cutting-edge search technologies. Open source search technology gives us tremendous flexibility, allows us to develop solutions very fast, allows the customer to take ownership of the system that’s being developed and now has comparable performance, scalability and commercial support to the traditional closed source world.
The real question is how this will affect the profitability of existing companies in the search space. I wonder who won’t be around at next year’s Online Information show…
As September begins, there are various events coming up that may be of interest to some of our readers. We have a list of conferences we’re attending and/or presenting at. Gartner are running their Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit in mid September in London. Also in London is E Commerce Expo 2009 in late October, which may be of interest as most e-commerce solutions will need some kind of search facility (although in our opinion many fall woefully short, failing to implement such features as spelling correction and synonyms).
For more Enterprise Search events, there’s a calendar provided by Information Today which is pretty exhaustive.
We’re finding more and more clients interested in the advantages of a powerful open source enterprise search engine. Thus, we’re looking at expanding the team – can you help?
We recently helped a small marine consultancy, running a Windows network, implement a completely free enterprise search solution. Even SMEs are now finding it hard to keep on top of the information they produce, and there are few low-cost options for searching their documents. Read the case study here (PDF).
The Burton Group have just released a report on open source enterprise search, available for $995. We were consulted as part of the research done by the report’s author, Larry Cannell, and have seen the full report – it’s a good overview of the current options available.
Microsoft have been asking open source companies not to compete on cost, but rather on value, according to ZDNet. Unfortunately the response to this hasn’t exactly been positive, as CNET reports. I doubt many open source vendors will be taking much notice of what Microsoft would like them to do, and suspect they will happily continue to make the point that if customers are looking at buying software & services, taking the cost of software completely out of the equation is almost certain to save them money.