New Scientist reports that HP may use the Autonomy pattern-recognition eDiscovery tool to develop a new search engine which would work in tandem with HP’s text-based search. The report includes this example:
…the ability to point your phone at an image and having it return web links, documents, and other information. Other applications might be more robust internal database search for e-discovery or for scientific analysis of large datasets.
Bloomberg reported that HP paid $10 billion to acquire Autonomy so this certainly extends the search engine wars!
Of course from Microsoft’s perspective the prospect that HP will have a new search engine could not have come at a worse time since Bing loses $1 billion a quarter, and CNNMoney reports that Bing has lost $5.5 billion since its launch in June 2009.