Competition fierce for search engines that get to specifics

September 8, 2003
by Chris Gaither

Ray Bedingfield's professional love affair with Google is over.

When search engines sprung up in the mid-1990s, Bedingfield, president of Woodmoor Group Inc., a career placement firm in Colorado, began using them to troll the Internet for information on managers to match up with vacancies.

He experimented with AltaVista, then fell for the world's most popular search engine, Google. It helped him find leads, research companies, and vet the background of potential hires.

Google is still his search engine of choice at home, but for headhunting, he now pays nearly $50,000 a year for Internet search software by Cambridge-based Eliyon Technologies Corp., designed especially for executive recruiters.

"It's like delivering a seven-course meal in one course," he said of Eliyon's system.

Although general Internet search has become an information industry, smaller companies like Eliyon are quietly building businesses selling more narrowly focused search programs. These young firms are helping people sift through vast amounts of information in ways that Google and other broad-based Web technologies cannot, from customer self-service to legal discovery.

The need to search through data extends far beyond just websites. In addition to enterprise-search software, a small publicly traded company called Convera Corp., of Vienna, Va., sells technology that helps the National Aeronautics and Space Administration quickly hunt through 7,000 hours of video from shuttle flights and space stations.

Engineers seeking footage of shuttle pieces they designed, astronauts wanting to review their performance, and investigators probing the Columbia accident have used Convera's "Screening Room" program.

Fast-Talk Communications Inc., an Atlanta-based start-up that counts Boston Millennia Partners among its investors, says its audio-search technology can scour 30 hours of recordings in one second and pull out specific phrases. "We are the Google of audio-video content," said its chief executive, Ray Naeini.

The trouble is, every search company wants to proclaim itself the Google of its own niche market. Although several analysts agree that Fast-Talk's technology is innovative, it has a lot of work ahead to match the reach of Google and its competitors.

US Bancorp Piper Jaffray predicts that search-related advertising will generate $7 billion in sales in 2007, up from $2 billion this year.

Investment bankers are drooling over the eventual initial public offering of Google, a privately held company based in Mountain View, Calif. Google's website receives 50 million US visitors a month, and its engine powers millions of searches on websites of other companies, including America Online, that license the technology.

Yahoo also sees dollar signs in search. It spent $235 million to buy search engine provider Inktomi Corp. and another $1.7 billion to take over Overture Services Inc., which specializes in pay-for-placement search results.

And lurking is Microsoft Corp., the world's largest software maker, whose monopoly in operating systems, tenacity, and cash horde should strike fear into any company in its way. Microsoft now licenses Overture and Inktomi search technology. But in a hint of its ambitions, the company in June set loose a new program, called MSNbot, that crawls the Web to compile information.

Beneath these high-profile companies are publicly traded search technology providers like Autonomy Corp. and Verity Inc. whose technologies help search corporate databases.

Still smaller, however, are the companies like Eliyon that are finding promising businesses in search. Websites like Monster, CareerBuilder, and Yahoo's HotJobs compile resumes of people whom recruiters call active candidates — people searching for new work. Employers search those sites to find applicants for vacant positions.

But corporate recruiters have a much harder time finding the passive candidates -- the managers who are happy in their current jobs but might be enticed to leave for the right opportunity.

That's where Eliyon fits in. Its software crawls 1.5 million corporate websites every three months, news publications and the Securities and Exchange Commission database every day, and press every hour, plucking out executive names, titles, and histories to create biographies of candidates.

For an annual fee of $10,000, Eliyon customers like EMC Corp., Reebok International Ltd., and Staples Inc. can search that database of 15 million executives by job title, company, location, schooling, and even ethnicity.

"We use it to look for professionals who aren't looking for jobs," said Kevin Fandel, vice president of corporate staffing for Boston Scientific who found 10 hires through Eliyon this year.

A Silicon Valley start-up, InQuira Inc., charges $150,000 and more to help corporations provide better customer self-service. When visitors to Honda's website ask whether the Accord comes in red, InQuira's engine takes them to not just links, but pictures of red cars. Type in "How much does it cost," and InQuira remembers that you were asking about the Accord.

With the Internet search field dominated by big companies, it's no wonder that start-ups have more modest ambitions.

When scientists from Hawaii invented search technology borrowing structural elements from dolphins' sonar systems, their business representatives decided to steer clear of broad Internet search. The resulting company, DolphinSearch Inc., of Ventura, Calif., instead built technology that helps lawyers during legal discovery.

During a recent legal spat between two large companies, Jackson Walker, a law firm in Texas, used Dolphin to scan several hundred thousand pages of e-mail and electronic documents for information important to the case. Before, paralegals and lawyers would have printed those e-mails and read as many as possible.

"We used it to find relevant data from a huge pile of potentially relevant data," said Wade Cooper, a partner in the firm.

Although users and investors are impressed with the expansive breadth of search engines like Google, apparently there's also substantial business at the other end of the search spectrum. Said Andy Kraftsow, Dolphin's CEO, "You don't have to conquer the world to be profitable."

Chris Gaither can be reached at gaither@globe.com.