Of course, one of the major reasons for attending an event like this is the networking and talks outside the main event, and it was great to catch up with others in the field – one meeting between a number of us with an interest in pipelining and data conditioning led to the creation of an informal group to discuss how we might better share ideas, code and best practises.

While we were at the conference the announcement that search vendor Endeca had been bought by Oracle – and yes, this is also probably about Big Data. These are fascinating times – is search becoming the enabling technology for a revolution in how we deal with digital information?

The post The Fall and rise of search in a world of Big Data – part 1 appeared first on Flax.

However there are some very interesting numbers in the latter part of the report. For example, we hear that an Exalead customer, the automotive logistics specialist Gefco, paid 700,000 Euros for the solution built for them to track around 100,000 events a day regarding 1 million vehicles. Appendix 2 has a list of various search vendors and associated costs: for example “The average selling price for the [Autonomy] IDOL tool is $375,000″ and “The price for the Oracle Secure Enterprise Search is $34,500 per processor and $70 per referenced user (with a minimum of 100 users).”

I would question whether these prices are sustainable given that alternative solutions based on proven, scalable open source software are now available at a fraction of the cost. Perhaps the authors of the report should have considered more deeply how this might impact the enterprise search market.

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