Got Search? - Company Business and Marketing

Industry Standard, The, Sept 25, 2000 by Alexei Oreskovic

The building blocks of Web sites came in all shapes and sizes, from high-end, high-price, made-to-order software installations to one-size-fits-all freeware.

Google for hire. A Web business that doesn't let visitors search its site is about as useful as a retailer that doesn't accept credit cards. But cash-strapped businesses don't need to spend big bucks to purchase special search software. Instead, they can rely on remote, third-party search engines to comb through their Web pages for free. Google.com, best known for its consumer Web search engine, is the newest entrant in this arena.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company's Free SiteSearch, currently in beta testing, puts a small, Google-branded search box on a company's site. The catch is that search results are returned on a separate page where Google shows its own advertisements. Google is by no means the first company to offer this kind of free remotesite searching--FreeFind, IntraSearch and PicoSearch come to mind. But most of these companies limit the number of pages they'll index (usually around 1,500 to 2,000), while Google will index an unlimited number. Also, Google's name has some cachet, and up-and-coming sites might see a benefit in being associated with the Google brand.

Something about the customer. Most customer-relationship-management solutions address a specific task, be it Web site personalization, call-center support or server log analysis. Thanks to a couple of recent acquisitions, E.piphany's new E.5 suite handles everything from customer analysis to contact management to operations. According to the San Mateo, Calif.,-based E.piphany, a business would typically have to gather products from seven to nine vendors to match the breadth of E.5's all-in-one Web-based offering. (But that's what all the CRM vendors say!)

While the strength of E.5 is precisely this integration, many of E.piphany's customers are Fortune 1000 companies that have already invested in various pieces of the CRM puzzle. Of course, businesses can purchase applications from the E.5 package piecemeal. But doesn't this defeat the purpose of E.5's all-in-one solution?