Byrne Tony Byrne

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Coming next...a patent on hit highlighting?

2-Jun-2006

Tags: Enterprise Search, Industry Standards, Endeca Information Access Platform

Here we go again. Search vendor Endeca claims a patent on "guided navigation." I've written previously about various patent absurdities in our space (Interwoven, Vignette, Oracle, 24/7 Media). Fortunately, the faceted browsing genie is out of the bottle, so I don't think customers need to care. As our new search report points out, nearly every vendor now offers guided navigation of some kind or another. At its core, this just means ordering and counting resultsets according to attributes, and then making drill-downs available to search, order, and count available subsets. Epicurious does this famously well. Some web applications do the same thing with simple SQL queries; that approach doesn't scale very well, but you get the idea: guided navigation is not new. A deeper read of Endeca's patent seems to suggest an emphasis on their particular approach, including their take on text pre-processing (i.e., automated metadata generation at index-time). Hopefully, the company will just wave the patent around to investors.

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