Yesterday the new iPhone 3G S was presented by Apple. Neither Telenor nor NetCom reveals on their home pages when it will be available in Norway, but Apple’s pages say it is already available. (more…)

Microsoft’s new search engine “Bing” which replaces Live Search, promises to be a decision engine rather than a search engine. Cominvent has tried it.
The front page of “Bing” is nice looking. I’m in Alexandria, and want to decide how to get from Alexandria to Hurghada, so I type “how to get from alexandria to hurghada”. The result set is a non-impressive boring listing of results, with exactly the same look & feel as Google results, not very innovative.

Let’s compare: (more…)

Kvasir (www.kvasir.no) just released a new version of their search, which they have chosen to call “search 3.0″. This rises expectations high, so let’s investigate how they do…

The old kvasir was one of the most used web searches in Norway, but they never really managed to beat Google in popularity, so far. So what’s new in the new version of their search, and has this anything to do with “search 3.0″? (more…)

As a search specialist I appreciate proper search features, also on the smartphone. For those of us remembering the PalmPilot back in 2000, it had a wonderful global search option, bringing up results from all applications in one screen. Perfect! And now we get this on the iPhone. In iPhone OS 3.0 coming this summer, Spotlight search will be standard. This is implemented as a new search screen to the left of the main screen, which brings up results from all applications in the same result set.
This is just perfect for quickly finding that contact you know lives in Sweden, or that SMS (or was it an email?) you wrote last week. I have always missed the PalmPilot’s powerful search, and now I can’t wait to see it coming to my phone – only 9 years later

Yesterday, Microsoft/FAST announced at the FAST Forward conference in Las Vegas the immediate roadmap of the FAST ESP (Enterprise Search Platform) product line. Also see what CMS Watch writes about the topic.

Office 14

The main news is that ESP will be included in Office 14, to serve as the advanced/extended search server of Sharepoint. It has long been a problem that the Sharepoint Search Server can only handle about 50 million documents, and by offering the FAST-based extension, this will be extended to almost infinite number of docs, as well as enabling some features which Sharepoint did not have as well (faceted navigation being one of them). The product will be more limited than the full-fledged ESP in that you cannot tune as many parameters. Much of the middleware and administrative components of ESP are stipped out and replaced with Windows/Sharepoint/MSSQL components, for a tighter integration.

But Office14 will not ship before 2010, so as a gap-filler Microsoft will sell ESP for Sharepoint for as little as USD 25.000 per server, which is a fraction of the typical license cost for such a system. This product is basically the same as today’s ESP, but if you intend to upgrade to Office 14 Extended Search, you better not use all the features of ESP, but stick to the recommended customization options which are compatible with the coming Office 14 search.

FAST Search for Internet Business

The second product announced is “FAST Search for Internet Business”, intended to fill the needs of the typical existing FAST customer within site search or e-commerce. Even the Linux versions of this product will be developed and maintained alongside the Windows versions.

A good question is how MS/FAST is going to maintain all these code bases going forward. I’d expect a consolidation sooner or later, and perhaps also an end-of-life announcement for the Linux platform support within the next 5 years. But that will only be speculations anyway