OK, I know, I’m supposed to be writing. But when IBM takes a shot like this across Google’s bow, I have to point it out. Ben Elgin, of Businessweek, heads down to WebFountain (yes, that WebFountain) and interviews the two chief geeks. During the course of the interview, Elgin asks if Google and WebFountain are similar. Dan Gruhl, WebFountain’s chief architect, answers:
We crawl continuously. We look to be updating our store [of information] within 20 minutes of when a page [on some other Web site] changes. We’d be happy to answer two or three questions per minute that are very complex and change how business works. That’s a very different target market. It’s kind of like saying: Yeah, strictly speaking a Rolls Royce Phantom and Yugo are both cars. But the fact is, they’re serving very different markets.
Oh my. I sense a certain frustration with all the attention those folks up in Mountain View have been getting lately.
I thought you found the “enterprise” space such a yawn 🙂 Shame our friends @ FAST over in Norway had to cut and run from the consumer space, looking at their recent 4.0 release, with the index they once held they could have provided the middle ground between the 2 spectrums.
The “usage” model which they are proposing is quite interesting as many fear with billions at stake, search may evolve into a black box technology, unfortunatley back where it came from.