Looking back at the search trends that were predicted for 2007 one can conclude that many of the larger research institutes, such as Forrester and Gartner, made a great forecast.

2007 was supposed to raise the question of 2.0 for search technology within the companies (and it seems like wikis, blogs and collaborative tools was all that we heard about for some months). Further on, there was a discussion of integration with business tools, such as BI and search, to create more powerful ways to extract critical data from several sources. The fact that IBM bought Cognos and FAST Radar says something about what we can expect in the future.

During the last months there has been a discussion of more sophisticated ways to develop enterprise search. The leading niche vendors such as Autonomy, FAST and Endeca have for the last few years been evangelists for search that goes beyond spellchecking and synonyms – talking in terms of information retrieval and knowledge management. It seems like a lot of companies have evaluated search capabilities, starting with basic functions, simply to realise that search actually solves a lot of problems they haven’t even considered.

It’s not a coincidence that giants such as IBM and Microsoft have strategies that will bring their enterprise search capabilities to new levels 2008.