http://www.searchenginelowdown.com/2003/10/ibms-webfountain-search-engine-to.html

October 15, 2003
IBM's WebFountain search engine to monitor trends Great coverage of IBM's WebFountain search technology can be found over at IT-Director.com. "IBM is realising the fruits of its three-year research project to create such a text analytics system. WebFountain runs on an IBM supercomputer and monitors everything on the World Wide Web. WebFountain contains over a petabyte of storage with over 3 billion pages indexed, 2 billion pages stored and the ability to mine 20 million pages a day. Web Fountain is not about building a better search engine; it is about identifying patterns, trends and relationships that can be used by businesses to transform the way they work. WebFountain can spot trends in public opinion and popular culture as they emerge and watch them catch hold around the world. WebFountain can be used as a surrogate for public opinion, providing instant, comprehensive virtual market research in the place of newspapers, Web page research or a professional report."


Sukgu's Comment - This is quite an old article. However, while I read the textbook of Strategic Management that I'm taking as KMBA course, I found out the introduction of this engine as a tool for external scanning that is the starting point for the corporations to formulate their strategy. This is a kind of synergy for me because I can apply what I learn from the different subject to MIS issue. Anyhow it's pretty interesting to see that IT supports almost every functions of business, even in strategy that is percieved as high level functions of business.