Companies looking to give internal corporate and external customer users enhanced capabilities for searching their Web sites are getting new options from several search engine developers.
Searchbutton.com and Intelliseek are each readying service offerings that make searching the Web more personal for users.
Searchbutton.com, which provides Web site search and reporting as services, will announce late next month upgrades to two of its four search services.
The company will add advanced analytics capabilities to Searchbutton Select, which provides Web site diagnostics and creates reports on, for instance, who is searching the site, what they are searching for and what they are not finding, officials said.
Searchbutton Corporate, which enables corporate Web site visitors to conduct e-commerce in multiple languages, will also be upgraded, said officials.
Meanwhile, Adobe Systems, Go2Net, ValueClick and NetMind all will announce next week agreements to integrate Searchbutton.com's search technology into their sites.
For example, Go2Net will offer Searchbutton.com on its site late next month to enable companies without a search capability to add a search box to their sites. This will provide capabilities for a metasearch (that is, culling multiple search engines to produce the most relevant results) internally and across the Web, said Steve Stratz, a Go2Net spokesman.
"The idea is to keep your users in a branded environment," Stratz said. "You want to keep your users on your site as long as you can and not lose them to other sites."
Outsourcing search
Separately, Intelliseek, a provider of infrastructure for portals, this week announced two outsourced search services, Intelliseek Web Search and Intelliseek Vertical Search, for mining corporate intranet archives, databases and catalogs.
Web Search combines content from structured and unstructured data sources, including standard Web pages, a catalog of more than 12,000 specialty database directories and archives, real-time news feeds, and a company's proprietary sources, officials said.
Through www.invisibleweb.com, Intelliseek also makes publication archives, shopping catalogs, law databases and court opinions available to search.
Vertical Search is targeted at such specialised sites as vertical industry portals, business-to-business exchanges and community sites. Its 10 search categories include business, computing, entertainment, health, investments and sports. Intelliseek can also add new sources or create new categories, officials said.
Web Search and Vertical Search are the result of Intelliseek's acquisition of ProFusion.com in April. Both are built on Intelliseek's Adaptive Search technology, which determines which sources to search.
Co-branding prices vary; in one scenario, 500,000 queries per month would cost about US$1,000.
