Convera and Factiva enter indexing deal

News and business information provider Factiva has entered into an alliance with enterprise search software provider Convera to provide search services to the government sector.

Convera Excalibur is a web index product for indexing, searching and retrieving online information. As IWR reported in December 2005 web indexes are the major development area for enterprise search players in 2006, with Convera and UK rival Autonomy both releasing new products. Factiva has joined three other online players as partners in the Convera program, including link analysis providers FMS Advanced Systems Group, geographic search abilities provider MetaCarta and Language Weaver, a machine language provider.

Tony Hall, Factiva director of global government relations explained that government organisations are looking at adopting the Excalibur index as part of their enterprise search platform. Factiva will be an optional part of the Excalibur index. Hall expects to see Excalibur used to search and index web sites and blogs as part of search results, with Factiva providing the user with the option of viewing quality results from those news and business information sources within Factiva ( click here for more Factiva news).

Mike Lynch, CEO of Autonomy described web indexes as the second stage of web search development as they contain concepts, which will benefit natural language searching, current web search engines depend on keyword indexes.