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Enterprise search

Autonomy tends to keep a low profile. Indeed, type the company's name into Google and you'll hit a women's clothing retailer, a student's MySpace page and a university philosophy class before you find one of the world's leading enterprise search companies.

"The truth is that Autonomy remains a British company that continues to innovate within the search industry. It doesn't get the headlines because it happens to do this at the commercial coalface that is enterprise-level search," said PC Pro contributing editor, Davey Winder. It's this situation that makes its recent

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public spat with Google all the more surprising. Google was riled that an Autonomy white paper accused its enterprise search appliance of "not indexing all your critical content" and hit back in lengthy fashion. The response isn't that interesting, but that Google felt threatened enough to hit back is. Its unease shouldn't be surprising. Founded in Cambridge in 1996 by Dr Michael Lynch, Autonomy has a market cap of $4 billion and counts the world's major banks, oil companies and car manufacturers among its 17,000 customers. This success, according to Winder, is based on its search technology.

"By applying Bayesian concepts within its enterprise technology, the Autonomy approach has the ability (once properly trained) to process huge numbers of documents in double-quick time - it is also language independent, because it defines meaning by way of the statistical similarity of the text within any document."

No wonder Google is worried.

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