Open Text's Web Search Server for OEMs; Offers Unique Intelligent Search Capabilities; For The Internet and Enterprise-Wide "Webs"

Business Wire, Sept 18, 1995

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 18, 1995--Open Text Corporation of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, developers of the Internet's most powerful text indexing and search engine, today announced that its technology is available to OEMs in its Web Search Server product, a powerful Application Programming Interface (API) and tool kit.

The product is designed to make it easy for developers to integrate the text indexing, search and retrieval power of the company's Open Text 5 search engine into new Internet-based applications, as well as applications designed to solve the information management, indexing and access problems of large businesses and organizations.

Yahoo! Adopts Open Text OEM technology

In a related announcement, Open Text and Yahoo! Corporation, publisher of Yahoo!, the most comprehensive, intuitive and up-to- date guide to the on-line world, announced that they have formed a technology partnership. Under the terms of the agreement, Yahoo! will incorporate Open Text's Web Search Server technology into the Yahoo! Internet guide. Yahoo! is the first in a series of OEM partnerships currently being negotiated by Open Text with major Internet and corporate networking application developers.

"As organizations reach for a global presence, they need major help managing their important information, and giving their employees, vendors and business partners timely and efficient access to that information," said Tom Jenkins, president of Open Text. "But it isn't a robust search capability alone that brings success. The real key is the quality of the indexing architecture. By using our Web Search Server tool kit, OEMs and other application developers can provide a word-by-word, full-text index of any database, no matter how extensive. They'll also build a tightly-integrated, high-performance index, equipped with the intelligence to understand and respond to queries that include such aspects as the structural elements of a document, the proximity of search terms and elements within documents and the similarity of documents to each other."

Jenkins added, "The Internet and enterprise networks are growing together at a staggering pace. Every day, thousands of new organizations adopt the World Wide Web as their 'virtual network,' and they all need index, search and retrieval tools to make productive use of the almost limitless information available in cyber space. Our Web Search Server technology is already providing these solutions. The enterprise version of our information management technology -- Open Text Latitude -- has already been implemented by such major corporations as IBM, Oracle and Caterpillar. We are also working with a number of major OEMs and developers interested in adopting our Web Search Server tool kit. The result is a new generation of applications that will help enterprises get their information in order, and ease the transition into the larger, on-line environment."

Web Search Server Key Components

The Open Text Web Search Server is comprised of four primary types of technology, each contributing to the overall suite's effectiveness. These components include:

o The Open Text 5 search engine -- The core of all Open Text's product offerings, Open Text 5 is a high-performance, scalable search engine. It includes intelligent capabilities for structure, proximity and similarity searches, in addition to complex boolean searches and the fastest word and phrase searching on the market. Open Text 5 handles multi-gigabyte databases easily. It has an open architecture for ease of integration and supports virtually all industry standard file formats.

o Open Text Crawlers -- Intelligent agents which constantly scour the Internet (and a growing number of enterprise-wide webs), indexing every word on every page, these crawlers also record the complete structural context of each indexed string. They constantly search for new documents to index, and revisit sites frequently to add "what's new" to the master index.

o API -- The Application Programming Interface for the Web Search Server was developed for flexibility and ease of use when integrating indexing, search and retrieval functions into Internet- and enterprise-based web applications. It enables the full range of Open Text 5's relational, intelligent data search structures.

o Administrative Tools -- In addition to the programming tool kit, Open Text also provides a complete set of utilities to simplify the monitoring and administration of Web Search Server applications.

Power Searching with the Open Text Index

Acknowledging the difficulty of explaining the power and intelligent search capabilities of Open Text's Web Search Server technology, the company created a robust implementation designed to challenge power users to flex their search muscles. Called the Open Text Index, it is the most comprehensive search and retrieval service on the Internet, delivering the Internet and all its information in response to your original queries.

The Open Text Index is a full-function service accessible by any user at any time. The index features a power user interface that includes the Internet's most flexible, powerful and productive search queries. These include Open Text's unique intelligent search capabilities that index and search on structural, proximity and similarity criteria, in addition to multi-level boolean Power Searches, prioritized Weighted Searches and Simple Searches for specific words or phrases.