One of the key themes emerging from this week's Enterprise Search Summit in New York is the preponderance of search engine and search tools vendors trying to develop content solutions instead of discrete pieces of technology. Search engine expert Steve Arnold would likely argue that such packaging moves are a lot of marketing fluff to cover up for ineffective technology, and in some instances he's probably dead right. There are a lot of folks out there with good but narrow solutions for search that are trying to cash in on as much of the current land rush for enterprise content integration as possible. But if they come up with good solutions that help businesses, who's to argue? A good example of this is Inxight's recently announced acquisition of the federated search and alerting assets of Intelliseek (Intelliseek holds on to their business intelligence pieces, already a complete solution). Inxight has been an interesting combination of content categorization and search tools and very interesting content visualization tools, but never quite able to leverage a wide enough base of content to make the most of either of these areas of strength. With the acquisition of the Intelliseek capabilities Inxight now can haul in content from a very wide array of external and enterprise content sources, normalize them into a common format for analysis and stream them out to their visualization tools or alerts streams via email, RSS and other transports. This provides a lot more value for their clients, even if it doesn't add any new or improved technology in and of itself. Content tool providers tend to come up with marketing plans after they've come up with the technology that drives them into the marketplace, which tends to limit their upside in providing valuable content solutions, but when you're in a market with interest as strong as the current enterprise search "gold rush," better late than never.