Connotate looks beyond traditional search

By Lou Whiteman
The Deal.com

Published: December 8, 2005, 7:49 AM PST

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A decade after Internet search was born, a new generation of tools is emerging to help corporate users and investors pry into information that older search engines are unable to access.

Among the leaders in this field of so-called intelligent search is Connotate Technologies, formed in 2000 and based on Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency-funded research done at Rutgers University.

Connotate supplies what it calls intelligent agents programmed to retrieve specific information from the Web in real time. The company claims its software can search more than 500 billion Web pages, including documents such as regulatory filings and databases. Such information is not typically picked up by more conventional "spider" searches, which identify Web pages and provide them to search engines such as Yahoo and Google.

The difference between traditional search and Connotate's offerings is akin to the difference between finding the date the Civil War ended and, say, the current price of oil. Traditional search engines excel at returning static information such as historical dates, but they are less effective in retrieving updated and ever-changing data like energy prices.

Though privately held Connotate retains some public-sector clients, the company has turned its attention to the private sector. CEO Bruce Molloy says the company's customers include two unnamed hedge funds, other financial institutions and corporate users, including Fairchild Semiconductor International, Cox Newspapers, McKesson and Careerbuilder.com.

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Connotate's search agents can be programmed to seek out specific pieces of information, such as a changing price, or a more general search term or theme. The technology can monitor specified Web pages as often as once per second, delivering alerts and summaries to customers via the Web, e-mail, mobile devices or databases.

The company claims that a traditional search engine would need 140 million servers to monitor the Internet for changes daily, and more than 3.3 billion servers to search the entire Internet every hour. "We collect and display information that the search engines will never see," Molloy says.

Hedge funds and corporate users can use the technology to quickly gather potentially key information. For example, corporations sometimes release bad news on their Web sites, conforming to federal disclosure requirements, without issuing a press release or alerting the general public. A Connotate agent could alert users moments after the news appears, giving a nimble trader or business competitor a leg-up on the market.

"We are supplying very specific information to specific people, and consequently we are just a niche," Molloy says. "But we believe it is a niche that is going to interest a lot of folks in the investment and corporate worlds."