InformationWeek

Thursday, May 15

Sovereign Hill Launches InQuery F or Searching Large Intranets

A company that grew out of the University of Massachusetts Amherst's Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval will make available to corporate users next week an advanced search and retrieval engine for intranets.

InQuery 4.1 is a tool from Sovereign Hill Software Inc. of Dedham, Mass., that has been widely used by large Web sites, such as the Library of Congress' National Digital Library and Thomas database, both of which contain hundreds of thousands of documents, and Lotus Development's customer/support Web site. The company believes it has the best search and retrieval solution for organizations with data in multiple databases in a distributed environment.

The firm intends to provide multiple components that corporate users can integrate into their systems to help them create knowledge/management solutions with intranets. According to Geoffrey Bock, senior consultant with Boston-based Patricia Seybold Group, "They seem to have a state-of-the-art system; it's a Mercedes." Bock cites as support the fact that InQuest has won the annual TREC competition which the National Science Foundation sponsors to stage head-to-head competition between different search and retrieval technologies.

Bock believes the Sovereign Hill tool is most useful for sites with very large numbers of documents, and especially for those with multiple formats, such as text, audio, video, and other graphics. The company has licensed the rights to all products that come out of the Amherst research facility, including InFilter, a real-time filter and information-push technology. The company is also releasing InFilter 2.0 next week. Prices on InQuery 4.1 start at $499 for 10 seats.

-- Jeff Angus