Search Vendors Directory

Vendor Summary: Still a Tier-N Game So who are the main players in Enterprise Search?  Keep in mind that ENTERPRISE search is different from eCommerce search, vertical search, and your favorite portal; in those categories the rankings would be different.  Also, since we are based in the United States, this will inevitably reflect a US perspective. This is not an exhaustive list; the Tier 3 list represents companies with a pulse, or that at least had a pulse in recent memory.  If you were to include "all" search engines, even those student projects not created in the shadow of Sand Hill Road, we believe there would literally be THOUSANDS. We also have additional lists for Federated and eCommerce vendors.

On the Cheap:

See our Free, Open Source and Low Cost page.

Established / Well Known

Tier 1 Players: Defining Enterprise Search 2.0 FAST Search & Transfer The "Bring it on!" guys www.fastsearch.com   Autonomy The merging of IDOL, Verity K2 and Ultraseek www.autonomy.com

Tier 1.5: The Challengers Google Rising fast.... great brand and some good sales numbers, still working on high end features. Endeca Tier 1 for eCommerce search, they practically defined that niche, and are now moving into the enterprise as well. www.endeca.com IBM Fading... If you haven't seen OmniFind Discovery Edition in action, you need a demo - very nice navigation.  This was originally called iPhrase but was acquired by IBM, which also has other search engines.

Tier 2 Behemoths: Still Struggling with Search 1.0 Microsoft A cavalcade of search engines. Vista, SharePoint, SQL full-text search, though they recently bought FAST. Oracle Acquisition of Stellent is a shot at Microsoft's SharePoint, but won't affect Tier 1 players.

Tier 2 Non-Behemoths Grokker www.grokker.com Can add clustering and brokered search on top of other search engines. Inxight www.inxight.com Search and entity extraction. Recommind www.recommind.com Concept extraction using semantic techniques.  Big in the Legal space Vivisimo www.vivisimo.com Good presence in parts of Europe ZyLAB www.zylab.com Document management, big in government sectors.

Tier 3: A Wide Range of Engines You May Never Have Heard Of As mentioned, this is not an exhaustive list, but rather the companies we continue to see or hear about, or are otherwise still on our radar.  A potential benefit to Tier 3 players is design variety.  If you have a somewhat atypical project, you might find a match here.  They will also likely be more price-competitive. Convera www.convera.com Formerly Excalibur Coveo www.coveo.com Formerly copernic Dieselpoint www.dieselpoint.com A popular engine for embedded search. dtSearch www.dtsearch.com Embeddable search engine for desktops and servers, claims high scalability, some traction in Australia. Engenium www.engenium.com Focused more on discovery than on search, believed to use heavy duty vector-space engine. Entopia www.entopia.com Defunct? Inquira www.inquira.com We've seeing clients replace it with newer engines. iSYS www.isys-search.com OpenText www.opentext.com Including LiveLink and Hummingbird.  Formerly PC Docs and Fulcrum. Pinpoint Decisions www.pinpointdecisions.com A variety of search appliances. Reveal Technologies www.revealtechnology.com Way cool Enterprise P2P search; find documents on all your roaming workstations and laptops. Siderean www.siderean.com Cool navigators, clustering and entity extraction. TeraText www.teratext.com Part of SAIC. Formerly InQuirion Thunderstone www.thunderstone.com Old school, but back with a search appliance.   X1 Technologies www.x1.com Desktop search evolving into Enterprise Search YourAmigo www.youramigo.com tresses search engine "optimization", also offers kid-safe / offensive-content-filtering tools.

Excerpted with permission from NIE 2007 Vendor Roundup.

Wikipedia also has a long list of search engines, though not complete nor ranked.