As for credit, I think we’re also agreeing that techniques for organizing search results have been around for a while. For example, Northern Light was around before both Endeca, Vivisimo, Hakia, and Bing. And of course Scatter/Gather work from PARC is even earlier, though I don’t know if any of it made it into commercial products.

In any case, I think it’s silly for anyone other than the lawyers to fight over credit, and I think that even the lawyers will have a tough time with the nuances.

With regard to “taking credit”, my only intent was to say that organizing search results in categories/clusters/facet is far from a new idea which makes Hakia’s claim somewhat odd. I believe that Vivisimo was the first company to offer commercially search results grouping of any kind (we sold and demonstrated the technology on vivisimo.com as early as June 2000, Endeca was created in 1999 but only launched in 2001 ). In no way we actually claim to have invented the idea, early prototypes had been created by Marti Hearst herself as well as Oren Etzioni’s team who had a live site running in 1999.

But to each his or her own. My point is not to criticize the various ways that people are trying to innovate, but rather to suggest that we’d be well served by using a consistent vocabulary to describe the various technical approaches to search–and by being cognizant of their history.