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December 6, 1999

Tools For Web Searches Get A New Focus
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Ask Jeeves is working on the problem. "We only cover a subset of a site's content," says Sean Murphy, VP of marketing for Ask Jeeves. Questions outside this range go unanswered. To compensate, "We're trying to incorporate a pure search," like the consumer version of the service, which scours the Web using a "metasearch" of several search services.

Ask Jeeves isn't alone in its pursuit of business customers and special services. Other next-generation search tools are looking to establish themselves on company sites, too. Heavily financed, 2-month-old startup Google Inc. has already signed Red Hat Inc. and The Washington Post Co. as customers. Google is distinguishing itself by not only analyzing the words on a Web page, but also by looking at what other sites are linking to that page.

For example, Redhat.com is using Google to search its own site as well as selected sites devoted to the Linux operating system. Google factors these sites into its search rating system; the more high-traffic sites that link to a particular page, the more "important" that page becomes and the higher in a list of search results it appears.

Google is offering site-specific and Web-wide search tools to business clientele for $150,000 to $400,000 per year. Even Copernic Technologies Inc., the company best known for its consumer metasearch utilities, has gotten into the enterprise act. A server-side version of its tool, CopernicServer, is now deployed by sites such as Bell Canada division Sympatico, Canada's largest Internet service provider and portal.

Since Oct. 15, visitors to Sympatico's French-language site can search for cars, jobs, and houses in the classified sections of major French Canadian sites; 5,000 searches are conducted daily. Sympatico's advertising sales force is recruiting sponsors for targeted banner ads--at rates considerably higher than the rest of the portal.

"We see this as a very significant revenue opportunity," says Nicolas Gaudreau, Sympatico's general manager. "We're always looking for ways we can play the role of a mediator or agent and add value for our users."

The same attitude is very much in evidence at Barnesandnoble.com, the online spin-off of the bookseller. Barnesandnoble.com features a search service from Northern Light Technology LLC as part of an ongoing push to make the site more than just a book E-retailer. The Northern Light tool lets users comb the Web for related newspaper and magazine articles after they've conducted an initial author or title search.

Photo by Diana Kassir "We're just trying to make it a more more useful site," says Tom Simon, VP of content development. Richer content, Simon says, will lead to longer site visits, which means more advertising and, possibly, more revenue.

The Barnesandnoble.com search highlights several ways in which Northern Light departs from conventional search engines. In addition to the usual list of search results, Northern Light also gives users custom search folders, which are automatically created when a search is conducted. These subjects and sources allow inquiries to be narrowed quickly--to differentiate between, say, searches for Neptune the planet and Neptune the sea god.

When a search is conducted, Northern Light uses an automatic classification process, based on neural network technology, to match each page to one or more of 25,000 subjects, according to Northern Light chief technology officer Marc Krellenstein.

Much of the material Northern Light returns during its searches are part of the service's 8 million document proprietary collection of articles from more than 5,400 newspaper, magazine, journal, and government sites.

Users pay $2 to $4 each for documents from sources such as the Baltimore Sun, The Economist, and Fortune. This revenue is often shared with Northern Light's client sites, which pay the search firm annual fees starting at $115,000 for the service. Such public Web searches are only one step in ongoing attempts by businesses to integrate new search tools. The next move, many predict, is to intranet and extranet sites. If greater, smarter information access and support works for customers, the thinking goes, why not for employees and partners?

Copernic and Northern Light have enrolled intranet clients, though they won't name them at this time. And Ask Jeeves' business customers are already musing about internal deployments of the service. While none of these companies would offer specifics, hypothetically an Internet search might look for sales figures for a particular region or marketing materials to handle a specific kind of customer.

"If this is working so well on the Internet, how about the intranet? Why couldn't employees ask about insurance policies, or benefits, or job openings?" says Office Depot's Butler. "There's so many possibilities." After all, more options is what Web sites should be offering.

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