This was a week of happenings in the search and web analytics markets.
Search:
- FAST announced that it was starting up the FAST Center for Search Innovation, a think tank of sorts on enterprise search. The interesting thing is it will be headed up by Hadley Reynolds, former Senior VP and Director of Research at Delphi Group. Hadley is one of the major analysts in the space, so it will be interesting to see what the Center comes up with. If it's anything like the book FAST was handing out at its customer get together in February, The Book of Search, it will be excellent.
- Autonomy reported that its revenue was up significantly: $61 million for the first three months of 2006, versus $20 million for the same timespan last year.
- Google said that it had updated two mobile search products: Google Maps for Mobile and Google Personalized Home. Nothing earthshattering here, just that they were tweaks to make them easier to use.
Web Analytics:
- Omniture, on its way to an IPO, pointed out that it had licensed nine patents from IBM, in addition to the NetRatings patents it had licensed earlier in the year. I view this getting its IP house in order before it goes public. As an aside, the press release makes an odd statement. It states, "NetRatings licensed to Omniture worldwide rights to its entire patent portfolio of 78 U.S. and foreign patents and patent applications. Omniture remains the only major solution provider in the Web analytics industry to have licensed these assets from NetRatings." Yet web analytics vendors licensing patents from NetRatings has become a common occurence, per NetRating's July 3rd press release that notes, "Unica joins Omniture, Inc., SageMetrics, Corp. and Visual Sciences LLC as a patent licensee under NetRatings’ patent enforcement program." Therefore, either Omniture considers the other three -- SageMetrics, Unica, and Visual Sciences -- as minor solution providers, or the others licensed only some of NetRatings' patents, and not all of them. Whatever the backstory, Omniture clearly wants to leave the impression that it's leaving the others in the dust.
- In a separate press release, Omniture announced that it had landed Salesforce.com as a client. Although it doesn't mention who it displaced, according to the currentl HTML source it looks like it was WebSideStory.
- WebTrends noted that booking were up 30% year over year, with its SaaS service, OnDemand, growing by 78%.
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