He said the potential use for Orbital technology on the Internet is virtually limitless. A person looking for information on travel, for example, could go to an on-line travel portal and submit a specific question. Travel experts who have signed on with the portal could then offer their opinion. The same holds true for any subject for which there are experts, from baseball to fashion to the manufacturing of embedded silicon microprocessors. One of the organizations that uses the technology in this way is PR Newswire, which offers a service called Profnet.
Reporters can submit a query to the database on any topic.
If the query is unanswerable from the database, it is then forwarded to experts in academia and private industry. What we offer is kind of like Ask Jeeves, but it's much more advanced, much more specific and much more user friendly. Orbital does not actually offer a search destination or even a search engine for people to use. Rather, it provides the infrastructure and software for companies to set up the search capabilities internally or for web masters to set up the search capability on their sites. But it's very unusual.