Seeking Business Customers

Search engine companies Moreover Inc., Inktomi Corp., AltaVista Co. and Logika Corp. are turning more of their attention to the enterprise.

As a result, enterprise users have more options to narrow their searches for key news and information on the Web.

San Francisco-based Moreover last week introduced its Business Intelligence Solution. The centerpiece of the package is a dynamic Web database that indexes news, information and analysis from more than 2,000 Web sites, message boards and discussion groups and delivers them to users in as little as 10 to 15 minutes.

Editors categorize sources into 300 topics and present the information as live feeds or links, all of which can be customized for business customers, Moreover officials said.

Moreovers technology has extraction, filtering and integration capabilities to eliminate irrelevant information and appropriately categorize material, officials said. It also enables users to access a variety of output types, such as JavaScript, HTML, Extensible Markup Language and Wireless Application Protocol/Wireless Markup Language. In addition to the Web, Moreover supports data delivery into e-mail, cell phones and personal digital assistants.

The technology is targeted at corporate intranets and extranets. One of Moreovers first customers is Inktomi, which will license Moreovers content database to enhance the news search capabilities within Inktomis Search Everywhere platform for Internet portals, destination sites and enterprises.

Similarly, Inktomi, of Foster City, Calif., last week announced an alliance with Virage Inc. to index the latters video clip content and integrate it with Search Everywhere. These new content alliances supplement Inktomis efforts to build out its search and retrieval algorithms, officials said.

Available now, Moreovers Business Intelligence Solution has a $30,000 annual license fee.

Wells Fargo & Co., also of San Francisco, has been using Moreovers free news service, called Webmasters, to access business, banking and e-commerce news headlines for six months.

Moreover “aggregates the news sources [so] you dont have to separately search Yahoo, which doesnt search against the sources that Moreover searches against. … Its more comprehensive,” said Paul North, manager of the corporate library at Wells Fargo.

Also last week, AltaVista Business Solutions announced enhancements to Search Engine 3.0. The search developers kit has expanded support for Java, including Java 2 Enterprise Edition; Component Object Model; and the Perl scripting programming language. The kit also supports multiple programming languages and platforms so that developers can focus on integrating search with other e-business applications, said officials at AltaVista, in Palo Alto, Calif.

The company also released a Java server component and an Enterprise JavaBeans component to integrate business logic with searches.

Separately, Chicago-based Logika last week launched its first 100 topic-specific search portals. Called first-search.com, Logika licenses these search portals to business-to-business marketplaces and other vertical portals. Search portal topics comprise 14 categories, including arts, business, home and news.