In the beginning....
...were a couple of fresh faced Cambridge graduates sitting in my office with a genuinely innovative and potentially very useful product. Their kit promised to be XML before XML was even a standard..
I was working in a major international law firm with 4.5 million documents that were growing like billio (unsure of sp, there and can't be bothered to look it up before you commentards go at my spelling) and we needed a way to find how we'd constructed documents in previous deals n order to cut down our overheads in the future.
I spent a long time with these guys, and they gave me a fabulous piece of search kit to play with for free. As it turned out, their stuff was rubbish for legal documents and we came to the conclusion that no amount of training (if you're not familiar with training software, think about training OCRs - it was basically the same scenario) would solve the problem.
As it turned out, we came to the conclusion that Goldfarb and Prescod had got it right with SGML (which was created to handle IBM's legal documents, globally - for the non-initiated among you, XML is a direct sub-set of SGML and it handles legal documents rather well and, unlike SGML doesn't require a couple of years to learn) and, really, no amount of training would solve our problems. We really tried.
To give you a specific idea of what the problems were, the word "service" is used in many different contexts in the legal world and none of us found a way of training an artificial intelligence machine to deal with that in a humane way - we just got junk in the search results. So, back to what's now called XPath and XPointer, I believe. It's been a while and this was "back in the day".
However, using the same kit to search the internet pissed all over everything available (and it would put Google to shame today, IMHO). Fabulous stuff.
After I'd done the research for them, they disappeared from the market and you couldn't buy their product unless you were a Rothschild funded government. Having spent over a year using Autonomy's kit on a daily basis, I was gutted when they pulled it from civilian life but did understand why it wasn't available to me any more.
In my experience HP make great hardware but don't ask them to give you software - their software just ain't as good as the sauce we all know and love.
HP really missed a trick there and more fool them. Autonomy came up with a brilliant game changer for searching in-homogenous data sets i.e. the internet and they are still a legend in my mind. Oh how I wish for a web search engine like that again.
As for Google, bah, yank spyware pish full of advertising crap that I don't want to see. So I never use their engine that was designed to wow noobs and, as far as I'm concerned Google is still not mature enough for a serious researcher who needs to find facts now, for a business case. So in my mind, Google is 20 years behind the times. Twats.
Oh remind me, what's Google's revenue model again? Oh yeah, the emperor's new clothes.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
