On More Cylinders By Christine Zimmerman AltaVista is turning inward, not for contemplation, but to make its search engine a better intra-enterprise tool. The vendor also hopes to spark a movement where enterprises integrate search capabilities with e-business applications to direct users to relevant information contained in different places, like a database or in a particular Web page.
Search engines can no longer be an application or an add-on feature.
AltaVista Co. This week, AltaVista is releasing an update to its Search Engine product, aimed at helping Web developers integrate search technology with legacy systems, databases and applications. The update offers complete Java support, as well as richer tools for programming in COM and Perl languages. AltaVista has taken a technology that was once used to check for information across a myriad of sites and turned it inward. By coordinating searches with their internal applications, site developers can offer much more information to end users. The vendor said that an overriding goal of the Search Engine update is to allow companies to provide very detailed responses to user queries, so they will not have to seek information from other sources, like customer service centers.