Search in demand as electronic data grows

Around the time of the dot com collapse, I was in Silicon Valley meeting with several major search engine portal operators.

I awoke each morning to find another had gone bust, as both the press and bankers wondered where their long-term revenues would come from.

Many perished, yet a few survived, as did some of the better technology providers specialising in search. Today, these search companies are able to demonstrate clear revenue-generating capabilities amid unprecedented demand, as companies and consumers struggle to come to terms with an ever-growing mass of enterprise and personal electronic data.

Search is finally at the forefront of technology thinking and spending. It is also attracting interest from the stock markets, as well as from old-money companies that are only now wading back into the technology world in search of acquisitions.

For example, online shopping giant InterActiveCorp recently announced a multimillion-dollar deal for Ask Jeeves.

As well as buying a popular and profitable search engine, IAC has acquired a technology base that will continue to yield profits through licensing deals.

News Corporation, the broadcasting and publishing giant headed by Rupert Murdoch, announced just last week that it intends to spend up to $1bn (£550m) on search engine investments, as it continues its internet acquisition spree.

Meanwhile, Yahoo will spend $1bn on a stake in Alibaba.com, taking the value of its assets in China to nearly $4bn (£2.2bn).

China is regarded by financial and technology analysts as the next major market for search portals. Household names are already buying their way into the market, while smaller operators, such as Autonomy and Blinkx, are collaborating on their expansion efforts in the region.

Chinese homegrown search service Baidu.com floated on the Nasdaq exchange two weeks ago, and was valued at just under $4bn (£2.2bn) at the end of the first day of trading.

Search technology is set to play a pivotal role in the way we interact with computing devices, and it will not be restricted to specific web sites.

We are already beginning to see the back-end search technologies used by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft leak on to the desktop in the form of client tools that can search the contents of a PC with the same accuracy and familiar interface of, for example, Google. We are even seeing the dividing line between personal and internet data blur, as these tools seamlessly search both your own data and the web.

And the growth in search does not stop there. Major search engines, and independent companies specialising in search technology such as Autonomy and iPhrase, have finally managed to crack the market for enterprise search, selling their algorithms and other tools into businesses to aid searching for content on their own internet and intranet sites, as well as providing more advanced search services and interfaces for content management systems and enterprise storage arrays.

With companies more reliant on electronic data than ever before, and consumers faced with web sites, email mailboxes, egovernment services and other repositories crammed full of information, having the ability to search effectively and find the one piece of information you need will be essential.