IBM WebFountain Surfaces In Fee-Based Search Service

IBM's vaunted WebFountain search technology is getting closer to actual use.

On Thursday, IBM and Factiva said they will work together to offer an intelligent search service based on the WebFountain technology developed at IBM Research's Almaden labs.

WebFountain, which builds on DB2 database technology, will first surface in a service for tracking corporate "reputations" by analyzing information from many sources, including Web pages and newsgroups, IBM said in a statement. The offering sifts through huge amounts of data and mines them for patterns and relationships that provide a context for a given search. No pricing or date of availability was provided.

IBM researchers told CRN last February that WebFountain would add needed "smarts" to search technology, providing users--at least in theory--with more than just a list of content that includes a search term. At that time, IBM Data Management Fellow Bruce Lindsay said the technology would be able to figure out what a given person in an organization does and search accordingly.

The technology, for example, could determine which words in a document are proper names and which are names of organizations and then perform intelligent text-mining based on that context. Companies could then devise specialized "miners" that build on body text and cluster classifications, and on annotations that are added later.

It's unclear how big a market there is for paid searches given the popularity of powerful--and free--search engines such as Google. If a service can successfully weed out nonrelevant search hits, there could be a business model, some observers said.

In the meantime, Microsoft, which already offers some licensed search capabilities in MSN, earlier this year released its MSNBot Web crawler and is said to be building a full-fledged search engine to compete with the likes of Google.