New player for search, IBM enters the race.

Using supercomputer and new search platform, IBM could be a new search ....

[trungngo]

Continued from:
[webmasterworld.com...]

---

Has anyone read this article yet? It appears that IBM's working on something very big.

IBM unveils an advanced Internet search platform [taipeitimes.com]

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 10:15 pm (utc) on Oct. 15, 2003]

[Yidaki]

Yah, almaden has crawled my sites since at least three years.
Will be interesting what they do with it / WebFountain now.

[jeremy goodrich]

Nice find, trungngo and Welcome to WebmasterWorld! IBM has been crawling for a while, I wonder if the competing news from MSN about to launch their own engine finally proded them into 'stepping it up'?

I heard a rumor that the last time the reason IBM's search engine plans got derailed was from one of their 'key' people going to work for Verity (provider of corporate search engine products for internal indexing / not web search).

Any time a powerful company with such a huge reserve of talent, money, and time to develop considers entering a new space it's exciting news. Will be great if they actually release something we can all play with soon.

[Skier]

IBM's interest in moving from word matching toward context based results seems like a very progressive development. Compare this to MSN's plans to profile its users and then word match to that.

I'll take the IBM train thanks.

[jeremy goodrich]

lol @ Skier, good point on the path they are both taking. Profiling - even to "help me" is something I'm not sure I'll ever want to use, even for the potential productivity gains.

[trungngo]

>>>Any time a powerful company with such a huge reserve of
>>talent, money, and time to develop considers entering a
>>new space it's exciting news. Will be great if they
>> actually release something we can all play with soon

I agree. Big company like IBM could easily become a leader on anything they want to, the main question is whether they find it lurative or not? In this case search is very hot ... so I can't see why IBM's not to take any move soon.

According to the source, IBM's supercomputer could "absorbs 25 million Web pages a day" so to match Google's index of 3,307,998,701 web pages they only need 132 days. That's about a period of only 4 months.

Since they have been working on Almaden for years, the release of their search engine definitely be a thrill.

[Jon_King]

Sounds to me as if they are going to do much more thorough page search (than Google) AND analysis then (obviously) sell the results/info to businesses.

[sidyadav]

yeah, As IBM and Microsoft are computer platform related companies trying to build their search engine's (IBM Search, still not realesed and MSN's new search, still not realesed) They could be a hit, because Google 'started' as a Search engine , as for IBM and Microsoft, they are already popular in different things and could have a success in their new Search engine's, Good luck to them ;-)

Sid

[mack]

Sounds like a very, very high tech version of clustering. Something similar to what we currently see over at ATW.

What will all this mean to the average searcher though? or is this service being aimed more towards the power user or busines user?

To be honest I am a little confused by the explinations of, what this new service will actualy do for the end user?

Mack.

[trungngo]

I just want to update more news on IBM's Webfountain [dailytimes.com.pk].

What do you think about the search engine war? I guess my favorite player will be IBM... can't wait until the release of their WebFountain.

TrungNgo

[Brett_Tabke]

IBM as a "dark horse".

It is official - I have seen it all.

[martinibuster]

Carlson conceded that the system could run into initial problems as text analysis skills are not yet as sophisticated as they could be.

Martinibuster Labs announced a new automobile. It will encounter initial problems as it's motor is still under development.

[PatrickDeese]

why would they brand a search using a domain name that is registered by another company?

It's Altavista all over again. Why didn't they search for that story in their new search engine?

[BlueSky]

I'm curious will the websites they index see any traffic from this or will it all stop at them. I think they have to retain copies of content or have a significant amount in their index to do this type of data mining.

Those who have had their sites crawled for years, have you ever seen any human visitors coming from IBM besides these bots?

[Learning Curve]

What we need is more people doing more searches for more products.

If these new search products eventually generate a bit of excitement with Joe Surfer, then we all win.

[garry]

Gee.... too bad for those not putting in meta data, in case they utilise Meta Tags?

[plumsauce]

... problems as text analysis skills are not yet as sophisticated as they could be.

To put this in context, the tendency at IBM is to
err on the side of caution. From anyone else, it
might have been worrying, from them, it is more
indicative that they have extremely high hopes
for the end capabilities of the system.

IBM is also well practised at executing long term
strategies.

++++

[kaled]

Unlike Microsoft, IBM has a proven track record at innovation. If this search engine is fast and aimed at the general public rather than business alone, it could be a worry for Google.

HOWEVER, given that people are used to searching using keywords, deep context analysis is tricky. Nevertheless, its advanced search capabilities might be impressive, and if it were able to differentiate a CPU bus from an (omni)bus that must be a good thing.

Kaled.