A company, which says it has a new intelligent search solution that will increase precision/recall, use federated search techniques, and runs on a Mac, scheduled a briefing with me earlier this week. Aside from the typo on the slides, the CEO obviously reading from a script rather than having a conversation with me, and his tendency to simply ignore any questions posed to him, we weren’t doing all that badly. It was towards the end of the briefing, when he mentioned the “Dialogs, Elsinores, and LexisNexis’s of the world,” that I came close to laughing out loud. Elsinore (or Helsingor in Danish) is a Kommune and the name of its capital city in Denmark. There’s a wonderful old castle in the city of Helsingor/Elsinore and is the fictional setting for Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” It is not an online search service. I had been chuckling over this “verbal typo,” thinking he must have meant Elsevier, when I talked to a colleague this morning. She had also been briefed by this CEO. He used the same Elsinore phrase on her. It dawned on me. He really thought that was an information industry company name. There’s something rotten in Mountain View, I’m afraid.