At times I get the feeling the content technologies aren't affected by the economic downturn. Some of the vendors we cover have come out with early reports on their performance over 2009, and so far the news is good.

For instance, French vendor Exalead proudly claims $22.7M in revenue, and 50 new customers. Canadian vendor Coveo isn't quite as open about the financial specifics, but notes 37 deals with new and existing customers in Q4 alone. I'll accept that there's at least some truth in the "record Q4 2009 results" and "significant growth" the company announced. (Though you can never be certain, even with publicly traded companies -- which Coveo is not.)

Then there's Autonomy, which has now branched out way beyond the pure enterprise search business. However, the English company's strategy still revolves around the IDOL search technology, so for good measure, let's add in their figures too: revenues of $740 million, up 47% from 2008, "including strong organic growth of 16%." And a staggering $323 million profit before tax, up 55% from 2008. Many stock traders may not know much about enterprise search, but they'll certainly know about LSE: AU.L.

Of course, this is just scattered evidence, and I wouldn't dare say that all of the vendors we cover in our Search & Information Access Research are breaking records in revenues or profit. (If only because companies that aren't doing so well aren't going to announce their figures with great fanfare.)

But it illustrates the sense I had this past year: that many of these products continue to be in high demand, and the content technologies are doing a lot better than the economy at large. At the beginning of 2009, we could still dismiss this as a delayed effect (projects already set in motion before the crunch hit), but evidently enterprise search continues to grow against the tide, at least for another year.

I can think of many reasons why this would be the case. (Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments below.) I believe the principal reason is that for many enterprises, search and information access technologies have become either just a cost of doing business (much as you wouldn't turn off the electricity in a shop when sales are slow), or a means to increase efficiency and get an edge over the competition (because unlike electricity, you can get better search). It's not something you cut corners on.

So even though the core technologies have been around for several decades, I tend to think this shows that there's still a lot of untapped potential for search in the enterprise. If you still think of search as a simple commodity, you might want to rethink -- you're being overtaken left and right.