Web search gets down to business

San Francisco - Web search results served up by the likes of Google and Yahoo may not be specialized enough to meet the needs of businesses. With this concern in mind, several enterprise search vendors are directing their technology toward Web search, offering ways to categorize Web data for specific markets and tie these fine-tuned Web results together with intranet and desktop search findings.

Enterprise search company Convera this week will unveil Excalibur, a private-label search service targeted at vertical industries such as media, financial services, research, and legal.

The search offering's Web page index currently tallies about 4 billion and can serve about 4 million queries per day, according to the company.

Excalibur can be integrated with Convera's enterprise search technology, called RetrievalWare, or be tied into other enterprise applications.

Excalibur indexes the Web with deeper granularity as compared with general Web search, according to Claude Vogel, CTO of Convera.

For example, Excalibur uses about 4.5 million categories, instead of the thousands or tens of thousands typical of other search engines, Vogel said.

One feature, called Facets, pulls together related aspects of a topic into subcategories, helping users find information that often gets buried in search results.

"Companies can benefit from content specific to [their] business coming from the Web," Vogel said.

Another vendor, Exalead, on Monday is launching Version 4.0 of its exalead one:search, a platform that serves as a framework for integrated products for desktop, workgroup, enterprise, and Web search.

Exalead is aiming to provide an integrated search experience that serves up results from multiple sources in a single view, said Francois Bourdoncle, co-founder, president, and CEO of Exalead.

"Right now, using desktop, enterprise, and Web search is a clumsy process. Everyone has [their] own desktop search and uses different Web search, and [users] get results on three different screens. [They] can't do serendipity, zoom in, and zoom out" of search results, Bourdoncle said.

By serendipity, Exalead means the ability to search how workers think, peruse related terms, and narrow down, widen, or refocus searches at any point along the way.

Exalead's index is approaching 4 billion pages and includes about 2 million categories.

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