TEXT RETRIEVAL: THE NEXT STEPS

Text retrieval is not a new technology — it has been familiar to library and information professionals for many years. For example, among the vendors we will look at here, PLS dates from 1983 and Fulcrum from 1984 — children compared to, say, IBM and Microsoft, but venerable in the general terms of the IT industry. Recently, however, several companies offering text retrieval services have begun to raise their profile — so much so that Delphi Consulting reports the text retrieval market has recently broken the half billion dollar barrier. Many of these companies are gaining the financial clout to add features to their products, or diversify, or head off in a completely new direction. Here we give a round‐up of some of them.