Verity To Release Ultraseek Search Engine

Verity Inc. next week will introduce its first full-blown version of the Ultraseek corporate search-engine technology it acquired eight months ago from Inktomi Corp. The focus is on an improved user experience and more detailed reporting.

Verity Ultraseek 5.1 represents Verity's first foray into selling more basic corporate search tools after years of selling complex information-retrieval, classification, and categorization technologies to large companies. The vendor acquired the technology from Inktomi specifically because it sensed it was missing out on smaller sales to companies that either couldn't afford Verity's K2 intellectual-capital management suite or weren't looking for K2's level of complexity.

The Verity Ultraseek release addresses a theme the vendor noticed as it analyzed Ultraseek's recent history of support calls, which indicated that most problems centered on the look and feel of the results page, such as fonts and other layout elements. To stem those problems, Verity injected Ultraseek with three capabilities:

• A mechanism that lets those who are tagging content create logical titles for untitled or poorly titled files and documents.

• A feature that highlights the searched-for terms in a resulting document and lets the user navigate through the document by jumping from one occurrence of the terms to the next.

• A layout manager that offers a one-click, drag-and-drop interface for customizing the look and feel of results pages.

The new Ultraseek also introduces a level of search analytics that Verity execs say has long been a standard of Web-search tools but has become increasingly important to business customers. "Up until now, it's been difficult to see what people are finding or not finding," says VP of marketing Andy Feit, who joined Verity in the acquisition. Feit says Web-search engines have offered more sophisticated reporting because of the clear financial implications of a search engine that interferes with online sales or customer satisfaction. Corporate search, he says, only recently has been seen as an important bottom-line contributor to business efficiency.

With the new reporting capabilities in Ultraseek, those monitoring intranet search activities will be able to access statistical trends highlighting such areas as the top queries, queries that yield no results, query results that don't result in any click-throughs, and the most-requested documents.

Verity Ultraseek uses a document-based pricing model, with an average deal size prior to the acquisition of $18,000.