"Vivísimo has introduced the Velocity integrated search solution to serve the needs of small to mid-sized applications within companies of all sizes," said Raul Valdes-Perez, CEO of Vivísimo. "We are stressing speed, flexibility, and the quality of the end-user experience. Vivísimo will continue to offer its Clustering Engine and Content Integrator to overlay other search infrastructures, whether pre-existing or of a scale that is beyond the 1 million target of the Velocity product."

The company stresses that Velocity lets enterprises search their content without forcing any pre-processing, such as modifying the existing structure, format, or organization of documents or servers, or pre-defining taxonomies. Velocity supports multiple file formats and languages. It crawls and indexes files from file servers, intranets, external Web sites, Lotus Notes, and even relational databases (using XML). It supports many file formats including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, WordPerfect 5.1, PDF, PostScript, e-mail archives, XML, HTML, RTF, and more, as well as documents in ZIP, GZIP, and TAR archives. The product provides multilingual support for the English, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, and other languages.

Users can search using full text, keywords, phrases, fields (metadata), and Boolean operators. Search results are clustered in the familiar Vivísimo folders. Sue Feldman, research vice president for content technologies at IDC, commented: "Many organizations have reached the point where searching corporate information returns an avalanche of results thereby overwhelming the user with possible answers to [his or her] query. Clustering helps to alleviate the problem of information overload by providing a navigable and easy way for users to find a complete answer."

Scott Purdon, COO of BoardReader, a public site that uses Vivísimo to let users search multiple message boards and forums simultaneously, said: "Users can navigate results by themes and find more information specific to their query, resulting in greater productivity and better-informed decisions. Beyond the obvious user benefits, Velocity also delivers rapid time to deployment and low total cost of ownership, making it the best enterprise search option on the market."

For viewing a demo of Velocity's capabilities, the company refers users to its recently launched free consumer search service called Clusty.com. Clusty, which uses a configuration of the Velocity software, combines metasearch with crawls of news, the Open Directory, and other select sources. It uses Vivísimo's clustering technology to group results into categories, making them easier to sort through.

Clusty, which is still in beta, offers customizable search tabs for Web search, news, images, shopping, gossip, blogs, and an encyclopedia (Wikipedia). Clusty queries results from LookSmart, Lycos, MSN, Open Directory, Yahoo!'s Overture, Gigablast, and WiseNut. While I think the choice of name is unfortunate (too close to "clutsy"), I think the company picked a winner for its enterprise product with its choice of Velocity.

Vivísimo also shows a demo of Velocity's capabilities using the final report of the 9/11 Commission (http://vivisimo.com/911). The Vivísimo Search Engine crawled the PDF of the document and then produced a demo that helps readers better understand the findings and recommendations by clustering individual paragraphs from the book and providing context within the whole document.

Vivísimo Velocity pricing starts at $10,000 per year and scales with the number of documents to be crawled or metasearched. The company said Velocity will ship within 30 days.