Moreover's Technological (and Human) Advantage
Anyone who has searched the Web for late-breaking news has often been frustrated by the lack of currency in the standard search engines. By trying to index anything and everything on the Web, most search engines can take weeks or even months to do a complete indexing run, thereby falling down on providing links to up-to-date news and information. Moreover takes a "less-is-more" approach, by targeting about 2,200 high-quality Web sites, message boards, and discussion groups. This, along with its proprietary indexing technology, means Moreover's content can be refreshed up to four times per hour.

At Moreover's core is a scalable, licensable, dynamic XML database created by its proprietary extraction technology, which crawls the Web and quickly extracts and filters information into targeted categories. Moreover's technology is optimized for the dynamic nature of news postings, using XML to index the metadata content profile as well as the content. Because the service provides only links to information posted on the Web, there's no worry about having to pay licensing costs for content. Rather than being up in arms, content providers are actually clamoring to be included in Moreover's list of indexed sites. Human editors oversee the indexing process, modifying and refining the rules. This continual human intervention results in a margin of error that is reportedly less than 3 percent.

Queried subsets of the database, such as e-mail headlines, market indexes, Web feeds, NewsBlogger, and other developers' applications through open APIs can be accessed and integrated through Moreover's Business Intelligence tools. The NewsBlogger news service has been steadily embraced by Webmasters for its ability to provide free headlines on predetermined topics for integration into Web platforms. The customizable colors, fonts, and layouts allow for a seamless integration that fits the look and style of various Web sites.
 

More Than Free Headlines
With the launch of Business Intelligence Solution, Moreover is going after a blue-chip market, which places a high value on current business and market intelligence. For example, Web searching is often seen as a colossal waste of employees' time. Even with skilled searchers who have access to complementary commercial systems, such as Dow Jones and Bloomberg, the inevitable time lag in obtaining and indexing content results in a dearth of fast-breaking business information that appeared online in the last minutes, hours, or even days. With Moreover's Business Intelligence Solution, business users can now get the topical information they need as it's being created online.

Early enterprise licensees, including such companies as British Telecom, Ernst & Young, MarchFirst, Wells Fargo, and salesforce.com, need comprehensive access to fast-breaking information on their company, competitors, and industry—the kind of information that can close a sale or drive a business decision. Salesforce.com now offers its 20,000 customers access to Moreover's Business Intelligence service through embedded search-box functionality within its own ASP-model sales automation solution.
 

An Intelligent Business Intelligence Solution?
Corporations are often unable to discover and exploit mission-critical business information while it's still fresh, sacrificing an important competitive advantage. Sometimes this inability applies not only to external sources but extends to knowledge sources within the organization. With Moreover's ability to mine the corporate intranet, making its content available through the same search interface, the knowledge management implications are very positive. "Moreover's dynamic search technology transforms the high-value dynamic Web into an enterprise-class information database," said Nick Denton, Moreover's CEO and president, and a former Financial Times reporter.

As a secure hosted service, Moreover's Business Intelligence Solution requires no on-site installation or management. According to the company, typical deployments are completed within 1 hour, and even highly customized deployments are live within just hours. A highly scalable database architecture provides performance and reliability guarantees. Moreover continually extracts valuable dynamic news and information headlines from qualified online sources, including those within the corporate intranet. Indexing and updating are near real time, so relevant information is delivered to customers within minutes of being posted on the Web.
 
Aside from its currency, comprehensive sourcing, and customizable delivery, Moreover also offers proactive content management and interactivity. Subscribers to Business Intelligence Solution can work with Moreover editors to build the exact news categories they need, which are then continually monitored and refined to deliver the best results for the customer. The partnership with NewsBlogger allows users to inject their own commentary around posted headlines, thereby adding value to relevant articles by providing the appropriate corporate context.

Additional customized sources can be indexed on the fly in response to customer request. Moreover provides 15 output types, including JavaScript, HTML, four flavors of XML, and WAP/XML, and supports delivery to the Web, e-mail, cellphones, and PDAs.

Moreover's Business Intelligence Solution is available now. Pricing starts at $30,000 per deployment and scales according to usage and premium services.
 

Inktomi Deal
Moreover also announced a new partnership with Inktomi Corp., a developer of scalable Internet infrastructure software, and one of the largest search engines on the Internet. Financial terms of the Inktomi deal were not disclosed. The new deal will license Moreover's Dynamic Web Database to enhance the news search capabilities within Inktomi Search Solutions' offerings for portals, destination sites, and enterprise customers. Inktomi will access Moreover's extensive database to optimize news search for Internet portals and other business sites that wish to deliver information to their users while it's still relevant.

"We are very pleased to be working with Moreover to provide news search capabilities to our customers," said Troy Toman, general manager of Inktomi's Search Solutions Division. "Incorporating Moreover's dynamic news database supports the Inktomi Search Everywhere initiative to provide a flexible, single-provider solution that helps end-users access the incredibly diverse information on the Web."
 

Other Partnerships
Denton said that Moreover will announce deals with two other major search engines in the near future, but declined to name the companies. Moreover also will offer its Business Intelligence Solution through integration partnerships with enterprise portal builders Epicentric, Plumtree, Microsoft Digital Dashboard, PeopleSoft, Hummingbird and others, which are incorporating links to Moreover's search engine into their corporate portal software products.

The emergence of new search technologies, which manage to separate the wheat from the chaff on the Internet, could spell a renaissance in Internet searching. Other new players include InfraSearch from Gnutella, and Outride from Xerox PARC. Perhaps the current fear of investing in tech stocks will allow these small initiatives to continue to innovate without being gobbled up by the corporate giants and, in some way, allow the Web to go back to basics.