Tava Insights: Productivity

The Browser Wars began in the early 1990s and continue to this day. While the “war” is not a literal battle, it is an ongoing competition between web browsers for market share.

While the early days of the browser wars were dominated by the popular Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer (IE) from Microsoft, there have been several major players in the market in recent years, including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Opera. In the beginning, Netscape dominated the market with its Navigator browser. It was the first widely used graphical web browser, and it quickly gained popularity due to its ease of use and versatile feature set. In 1995, Microsoft released IE to challenge Netscape’s dominance. IE featured a more sophisticated user interface, but it was not as popular as Netscape.

In 1998, the US Department of Justice sued Microsoft for anticompetitive practices, claiming that the company was using its monopoly power to prevent competitors from entering the market. Microsoft eventually settled the lawsuit and agreed to change certain business practices. As a result of the settlement, Microsoft had to make its Internet technologies available to other companies at no cost. This opened up the market to new competitors and signaled the beginning of the browser wars. In the late 1990s, Netscape continued to lose market share to IE and other browsers. In 2003, the company discontinued development of its Navigator browser and released the source code to the open-source community. This gave rise to the Mozilla Firefox browser in 2004, which quickly became popular due to its speed and security features.

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Ask Jeeves was a popular search engine in the late 1990s that introduced a novel approach to web searches, prioritizing user-friendly, plain language queries over carefully worded keyword searches. Launched in 1997, the platform quickly gained traction for its inventive use of a responsive, butler character named “Jeeves” who would fetch search results upon user’s inquiries cast as full-blown questions, thus initiating a more conversational manner of searching the web.

Unlike most search engines of the time, which required precise wording and specific keyword input to deliver accurate results, Ask Jeeves was designed with a focus on natural language processing. This unique selling point appealed to a wide user demographic, making the internet more accessible to less tech-savvy individuals. User queries answered by Jeeves could be as simple as “What’s the weather like?” or “Where can I find a good Italian restaurant?”

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The search engine industry was born out of a growing need to help people find information quickly and easily. With the rapid growth of the internet, finding the right information became increasingly difficult. As a result, a new market emerged, one that would provide online users with the ability to quickly and accurately search for the information they needed.

In the early days of the internet, users had to rely on manually searching for information. This process was time consuming and often yielded little to no results. People had to know exactly what they were looking for in order to find it, and even then the results were often incomplete. Search engines began to fill this need, providing users with a way to quickly and easily find the information they needed.

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That will be a longer story – TAVA Discovery’s story that goes back a few years, in some cases almost 25 years back but the main points are a little over 4 years in the making actually.

I have been creating business software systems since mid 90’s. Yes, been dealing with software systems creation, optimization, and improvement as well as IT innovation in general for quite some time now. I have been always fascinated by the mere fact that the world is producing, recoding, and storing vast amounts of information on a daily basis. With the advancement in technology, both hardware and software, and the cost of personal and business IT systems becoming more and more affordable, the amounts of created data, information and content have exponentially grown in the last 2 decades.

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You dare suggest, good people of TAVA, that I’m bad at multi-tasking?

No, “not possible,” you say. 

Sorry for the bad news but you’re probably bad at multi-tasking. And by the way, it’s not just you. It’s all of us.

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Generally, our users are smart, curious, accomplished, and time starved. TAVA is built to remove the time-sucking, “taskiness” of searching for information, allowing them to focus on their work instead.

Okay. So, what does TAVA do?

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