No tagging, no optimization - just acting on real content

Wouldn't that mean the end of SEO as we know it?

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UK headquartered Autonomy offers to grab a company's or any other environment's "80% (on top of the 20% being organized) of cluttered info, docs, media, what have you..." and presents it matched against dynamic profiling as of the users request, behavior and requirement.

Live.

Web, network, email, streams, audio, video, online, offline, canned, office docs, html, pdf, you name it.

Wouldn't this be the future of automatically being presented what is being measured as your ultimate need? By not even searching/finding?

Talking 'bout Negroponte's bible BEING DIGITAL.

Wouldn't that mean the end of preparing docs, media to compliment any type search technology? The end of SEO really? Along with it: a massive change in the presentation, thus change in SEM at the same time?

Your thoughts, experience, insight, dreams please.

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Anyone? I thought this might be of any interest to all the SEO's around here, no?

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Personally, I might have found it interesting if I hadn't already banned Autonomy from my network of sites...

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And why is that?

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I'll start off by pointing out that Autonomy has not been singled out, and that my sites are non-commercial...

Why? Here's a half-dozen reasons, for starters...

• How does it benefit me? It doesn't, as far as I can tell.
  
• How does it benefit my current or future visitors? It doesn't, as far as I can tell.
  
• Will this generate qualified traffic for me? Very little, if at all.
  
• Harvesting my sites for Business Intelligence is like harvesting the ocean for beef steaks.
  
• Why harvest my site if your product is meant for organizing your clients' data?
  
• You're making money off of my hard work that I offer for free. Where's my cut?
  

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Thanks for your view, but now we got a bit off-topic. Anyone want to provide an opinion as of the original post?

[balam]

An opinion?

Well, it's not a exciting as it sounds, it would seem. Autonomy has been touting this for years and it appears that no industries have been shaken up.

My favourite line from their site would have to be, "Autonomy's technology is horizontally focused, with customers in almost every vertical market.", but that might be because I prefer to move in obtuse directions.

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Well, with Homeand Security, CNN, Novartis and BP as customers I would still believe their technology has some merit. What if Google would pick them up?

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Oh, I'm not poo-pooing their technology because it does sound interesting. It just doesn't look like they've created any great paradigm shift with it - at least, not on a large scale.

Now, if this was rolled out to the masses - if say, Google did/does snap these folk up - then yes, I could see this being a death knell for SEO. Content would again be king.

Perhaps Google is working towards this already? After all, there's the (web) search engine, Picasa, desktop search, (searching in) Gmail... How far off is the day where I can enter a search term in a single form (somewhere) and all resources available to me - my machine, network, and email, the web and whatever else - are searched for relevant info? (Or are we there already? I'll admit I haven't installed any Google technology in my environment, so I'm not sure of the capabilities of their desktop search.)

.....

The client I found to be interesting, and perhaps a bit frightening, is the Singapore Police Force. The thought that a police force needs something like this just sends Big Brother shivers up my spine. At the same time, I can see how someone like Autonomy can help (an) investigative service(s) cope with something called, of all things, linkage blindness, which is just what it sounds like - an inability to see common threads or links. (I'm also surprised the term hasn't jumped, or been co-opted, from the world of crime to be used in search engine discussions. I'm doubly surprised that there's less than 300 results for the term when searching, but not surprised that a good amount of references deal with serial murder.)

Hmmm, I think I'm drifting (again)...