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The Ongoing Search: Page 2 of 3

All this is of special interest to those involved in sifting through backup tapes for specific documents mainly, legal search teams and service providers who help them organize their evidence.

One of these, National Data Conversion, is involved in helping law firms locate and retrieve the data they need just to get going in their discovery processes. This can involve looking through the contents of hundreds of tapes just to isolate a few items that may pertain to a particular lawsuit or court order — a task that folk call on NDC to perform.

"We are now with Index Engines adding a much deeper view of content far earlier in the process," says Chris Clark, COO of NDC. "This provides layers of time savings. It takes out the iterative, hole-drilling mechanics of cataloging and selective restoration."

Index Engines' application and FAST's BI tools address entirely different market needs — yet both are roughly classed as search products. One is concerned with levels of detail in complicated database-driven apps, while the other supplies a few fundamental but vital basics. What could be more demonstrative of the broad range of problems search products address?

The spectrum of search products widens if you look at the number of startups involved — all with their own take on the problem of search. There's Kazeon, with its emphasis on compliance; Scentric, with a new set of preconfigured enterprise "software only" suites for data protection; Njini, with the goal of integrating with search engines from other players. (See Kazeon Reduces Cost of E-Discovery, Scentric Rolls Out Suites, and Classifiers Grab Search Partners.) And that's not to mention StoredIQ, Mathon Systems, and several others, many of which are joining with Google in pursuit of the enterprise market. (See Content Classifiers Glom Onto Google.)