"We work with the clients to integrate the content behind their firewall and build out their own intranet," says Clare Hart, president of the Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group. "FAST fit the profile for both the commercial product and the relationship we could have with out clients."

Spending on enterprise search is growing much faster than overall IT spending, according to Forrester's Brown. Nearly all major enterprise search vendors experienced a 65 percent to more than 100 percent growth rate last year, he says. The question is whether it will remain as a separate software category for long.

"Enterprise search is getting embedded in a lot of different solutions, like business intelligence, compliance, e-discovery, surveillance, security, fraud detection and quality management," Brown says. "There is a whole range of business-critical applications that go beyond just document retrieval, and search is playing an important role there."

Search vendors, therefore, may wind up becoming absorbed by larger companies. For example, Yahoo bought Inktomi in 2003, and Oracle Corp. bought TripleHop Technologies Inc. last year and plans to integrate that company's search functions into its database line.

"There are indicators that information access is moving toward absorption into applications," says Gartner's Knox. "This seems to be how Microsoft is heading with Vista and Office 12, and may be what the bigger players such as IBM and Oracle go for."