Vivisimo Crawls for the Enterprise

The search startup targets SMBs by combining its clustering technology with a new enterprise crawler.

Search startup Vivisimo on Tuesday will unveil its latest foray into the enterprise search market, which combines clustering with meta-search and custom crawling.

Pittsburgh-based Vivisimo Inc. is known for its clustering technology, which dynamically categorizes search results as an alternative to typical, link-based results. It uses the technology as the centerpiece of its recently launched Clusty consumer search site.

Now, the company is expanding its search software with the launch of Vivisimo Velocity. Velocity provides Vivisimos Cluster Engine along with the ability to crawl as many as 1 million documents from a corporate intranet, file systems and Web sites, said Vivisimo co-founder and CEO Raul Valdes-Perez.

Where is clustering going? Click here to read more.

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The software suite also includes Vivisimos meta-search capabilities, so an enterprise can pull results from other internal or external search engines.

"The reason we decided to design our own crawler is that we were seeing a lot of problems today," Valdes-Perez said. "One problem we were finding is that customers have to repurpose or recustomize their content to placate their search-engine product."

For example, some enterprise search products might require users to transpose each individual entry of a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to HTML in order for entries to be searchable. Velocity avoids such retrofitting through the use of customizable style sheets, Valdes-Perez said.

The clustering engine also alleviates the need to create taxonomies and categories for various types of content within the enterprise because it determines categories on the fly for an individual search.

Velocity isnt the first time Vivisimo has targeted the enterprise. It already was offering its clustering engine as an overlay on larger corporate search products, such as those from Verity Inc, Google Inc. and even enterprise software makers.

Click here to read more about Googles growing enterprise ambitions.

But Velocity marks its first enterprise crawler. It can crawl across popular documents types from Microsoft Office files to PDFs, and is targeted to small and midsized applications as a simpler and less expensive alternative to large, enterprisewide search indexes, Valdes-Perez said.

Vivisimo Velocity will be available within the next 30 days, and pricing will start at $10,000 for a yearly license. Velocity is being built to run on the Linux operating system, though the company is considering porting it to other platforms in the future, Valdes-Perez said.

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