Thanks to Bill Slawski’s posts, I’ve been aware of a few search engine technology related patents published by IBM and also about some really good articles on SEO published on their official website.

The intent of these patents and of these articles aren’t really clear. We know that IBM has been involved in search engine technology, this page gathers all kind of articles regarding IBM and its relation with search engine technology.

More recently, IBM announced that they have been chosen by The International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA) to develop and online clinical trials portal, that allows patients and physicians to easily find “medical information from more than 88,000 pages of ongoing and completed clinical trial studies worldwide, allowing users to search in German, French, Japanese and Spanish, as well as English.”

The search technology developed by IBM seems very advanced, and uses techniques that no other traditional Internet based search engine is currently using:

The portal uses IBM’s advanced text analytics and content discovery capabilities, extending beyond conventional Internet-based search to help interpret and understand the medical information an individual wants and needs — even if their query contains misspelled words or jargon. For example, patients are sometimes unfamiliar with medical terminology, so the system suggests synonyms for medical conditions and medicines, which helps to correct misspelled words.

IBM’s vision could be to develop search technology for companies that have specific goals and unique requirements. Google also developed products to help businesses search their information, but it doesn’t seem to be something revolutionary.

From what I understand, if a company’s using Google Mini or any other Enterprise products, it’s just a search engine with shallow functions.

On the other side, IBM’s example with their technology that allows multi-criteria search, text analysis, vertical search etc, seems to be able to provide advanced search technology to businesses that need to be very efficient and find the right information.