what i meant was that the service approach is the future comparing to the approach that search is as a product sold to enterprise. by the way, i do want to point out a couple of things here since you mentioned altavista and inktomi. altavista was in the first wave of general purpose type of web search engine came out to market, inktomi was the king back to 1997/1998, they made substantial contribution to search engine development. they failed to sustain the lead in business world due to various reasons, but they did have their value. Probably late comers like google learned something from what they laid on the ground