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March 27, 2000

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AltaVista Renews Its Push Into Business Market
Search Engine 3.0 provides software developers' kit, query processing, and sorting capability

By Matthew G. Nelson

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    AltaVista Co., the Internet portal and search engine company, is trying again to make its mark in the business market. It has begun a concerted push to provide companies with technology that lets E-commerce sites, information portals, and business-to-business marketplaces offer enhanced search capabilities.

    The company last week introduced AltaVista Search Engine 3.0, which can search the Web, databases, and more than 200 file types, and a complementary software developers' kit. The release also includes query-processing tools, the ability to sort responses by importance and other factors, support for more than 30 languages, query spell-checking and correction, and Java wizards to alter the engine.

    Ariba Inc., which provides business-to-business marketplace software, is testing the developers' kit with several of its customers' marketplaces and plans a full rollout of the new search engine by July, says Ken Leung, VP of engineering for the Ariba Network.

    "What made AltaVista's search engine our choice was the flexibility with the SDK," Leung says. "Catalogs are essentially free [unstructured] text, and we used the index technology to allow a parametric search capability. From a corporate point of view, it's essential that you are giving the user the right information."

    AltaVista's push to provide search-engine technology to the business market isn't new. But the company acknowledges that it has failed to grab much mindshare in that market, says Jeff Black, VP and general manager of AltaVista's business solutions group. "In the last three years, we were very stealth. But we still signed up over 900 customers in the E-commerce marketplace," Black says.

    Adds Dana Gardner, a research director for the Aberdeen Group, "I like the idea that you can go in and search your internal databases, not one at a time, but in groups."

    The AltaVista Search Engine 3.0 is available now for Windows NT; pricing is based on the numbers of documents being indexed.


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