oingo Launches Revolutionary Search Technology; Poised to Change Current Search Standards, Caltech Graduates Announce the Release of Proprietary Meaning-Based Search Tool, oingo

Business Wire, Oct 7, 1999

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 7, 1999--

oingo Inc., a Los Angeles-based company, announced its launch of a meaning-based search technology appropriately named oingo(TM) (www.oingo.com).

After a year of development and testing, oingo search technology is now available to portals for licensing. As a first demonstration, the company has applied its patent-pending meaning-based search technology to the Open Directory Project.

Combining its cutting-edge search innovation with ODP's tidal wave momentum, oingo is set to blow new doors wide open with its meaning-based search tool that allows users to find the most relevant and accurate results.

With the size of the web at 800 million pages and growing rapidly, even very basic Internet searches are becoming increasingly arduous. The proliferation of sites overwhelms and challenges the capacity of many of today's search tools.

oingo is an effort designed to search the web by meaning and word relationships rather than by literal text, thus eliminating useless and irrelevant information. By doing so, it also results in pulling up related data that is sometimes missed by text-based engines.

Perhaps most importantly, oingo's architecturally scalable search technology is designed to accommodate the continued growth of the Internet.

"Understanding the meaning of a user's search query is the most important part of finding relevant information," said Gil Elbaz, co-founder and CEO of oingo. "The wealth of information on the web is useless if the search engine you are using doesn't really know what you're looking for."

Meaning-based search is a more technologically advanced method than traditional text-based searching. For example, when traditional search engines are not able to find all three words in a search phrase, they begin to look for web sites with only two matching terms, at times altering the very nature of the query.

Meaning-based search goes beyond typical text-string matching by searching for web sites with the same meaning as the initial query. In an effort to best satisfy the user, oingo returns web sites with closely related meanings despite no matching text, while also sparing the user from seeing web sites that contain exact text matches, but have completely the wrong contextual meaning of the original search.

"We are thrilled to unveil oingo to the Web," commented Eytan Elbaz, director of business development. "We have received phenomenal response from our beta testers and are confident that oingo technology will be incorporated by many leading portals."

oingo users will see obvious differences immediately, such as the ability to refine a search by choosing among the varied meanings of a word.

oingo was conceptualized and conceived by two Caltech alumni with 30 years of combined experience in designing and building highly scalable information systems, database application development and software engineering.

Behind the walls of oingo reside a multi-talented team that has developed a largely language-independent database, the oingo Lexicon(TM) -- creating one of the most powerful and intelligent search tools available in the marketplace to date.

At Internet World, oingo will be exhibiting in Booth No. 4184 in the "Launch Pad."

Note to Editors: Phase I of oingo funded by spotIdeas.com(TM) Internet Ventures, Sherman Oaks, Calif.