Search Engines Fire On More Cylinders

By Christine Zimmerman

AltaVista is turning inward, not for contemplation, but to make its search engine a better intra-enterprise tool.

The vendor also hopes to spark a movement where enterprises integrate search capabilities with e-business applications to direct users to relevant information contained in different places, like a database or in a particular Web page.

"Search engines can no longer be an application or an add-on feature. They need to be a fundamental layer of the enterprise architecture that understands how information is structured within a company," said John Piscitello, senior marketing manager at AltaVista Co.

This week, AltaVista is releasing an update to its Search Engine product, aimed at helping Web developers integrate search technology with legacy systems, databases and applications. The update offers complete Java support, as well as richer tools for programming in COM and Perl languages.

"This gives search engines another dimension of usefulness and power," said analyst Dana Gardner of the Aberdeen Group. "AltaVista has taken a technology that was once used to check for information across a myriad of sites and turned it inward."

By coordinating searches with their internal applications, site developers can offer much more information to end users. For instance, using Search Engine's e-commerce framework, companies can develop specific capabilities such as value-driven searches, custom ranking and category-based searches.

"This makes searches actually lead users to transactions," said Piscitello.

The vendor said that an overriding goal of the Search Engine update is to allow companies to provide very detailed responses to user queries, so they will not have to seek information from other sources, like customer service centers. And though AltaVista said customers were beta testing the upgrade, the vendor provided no customer references.

Search Engine provides sample integration and development modules and codes that allow companies to integrate searches and applications easily, according to the vendor. The product is based on technology used at www.altavista.com, which fields about 40 million queries each day.

Pricing starts at $25,000 for 50,000 documents, and $50,000 for 250,000 documents. Beyond that, prices are based on the number of documents and number of CPUs.

In related news, Sun Microsystems last week said it plans to acquire knowledge management vendor grapeVINE Technologies. Terms weren't disclosed.

Sun will tap grapeVINE to plug some holes in the portal server offerings of iPlanet E-Commerce Solutions, which Sun jointly owns with America Online.

IPlanet says its portal software will be integrated with the Compass Server search application and its Compass Server for grapeVINE option, an add-on for customizing Compass Server.

The integrated products will be renamed Personalized Knowledge Services and should be available by March 2001, said John Fanelli, a director of product marketing for iPlanet. Pricing hasn't been determined yet, but Compass Server will be offered for free as a standard part of the portal package.--Jade Boyd contributed to this story