Paglo Launches Search Engine Tailored For IT Departments

Paglo, a new search engine designed specifically for IT shops big and small, debuted Monday as the latest creation from two search industry veterans.

Billed as "the world's first search engine for IT," the Pago search engine finds and indexes IT devices and their IT configurations. Paglo's CEO Brian de Haaff and CTO Chris Waters, who sold their Network Chemistry toAruba Networks last summer, believe their new search engine will appeal to firms with 50 to 1,000 online employees.

"This is a fresh idea," said de Haaff in an interview. "No other search engine does it the way we do it. Paglo can return simple text or rich quantitative data." He added that users have been finding the company and 3,500 of them have signed up for Paglo's private test program.

The search engine indexes users on IT networks and can deliver a variety of answers ranging from how many users are active on a site at a given time and how much memory they are using to whether users are in compliance with Microsoft licensing requirements and whether the latest security patches are in force.

A variety of dashboards is available to users; the dashboards are versatile in that they can be presented individually or in groups and even shared by other IT shops. "The community concept is important," de Haaff said. "After searches are saved, they can be shared with others. In this way, the concept can be shared."

The Paglo crawler is downloaded to a single Windows-based computer or server. The search engine is offered free-of-charge; de Haaff said the company plans later to figure out ways to "monetize" the product.

The firm carved out a core of technology and expertise from de Haaff's and Waters' previous company, Network Chemistry. They also drew on a previous endeavor called Project Wishbone. Like Network Chemistry, Paglo has received venture funding from Geneva (Switzerland) Ventures and France Telecom's venture capital unit.