Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) plucked enterprise search vendor Endeca off the market last week, grabbing another independent search player. HP (NYSE: HPQ) picked up Autonomy, a company that does a number of things, but is probably best known for search, earlier this year.

There is little doubt that both these technology giants went after search players for a reason, and that's to find ways to make sense of the mountains of unstructured data inside today's modern enterprises, content that is only going to grow over the coming years.

As I've written, these two companies have seen the handwriting on the wall and they are looking to help organizations find those nuggets of data that matter most at any given moment from the giant mass of information.

Alan Pelz-Sharpe from Real Story Group sees it a bit more narrowly focused than I do, however. He sees Oracle going after a retail niche, one that Endeca has tried to exploit in recent years, but Endeca has built those retail applications on a broader search application platform, one which you can build many types of applications, and I'm wondering if it's this broader platform play that Oracle hopes to take advantage of.

Whatever the reason, it will become clearer over time as Endeca is brought into the Oracle fold and its search tools are embedded in Oracle products. 

For more:
- Oracle's press release

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