Sunday, March 07, 1999

Search engine hits bulls-eye

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West Chester entrepreneur harnesses power of Web

BY JOHN ECKBERG
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Mahendra Vora's company has created a revolutionary search engine. (Tony Jones photo) | ZOOM |

        At worst, visits to the Internet can be a frustrating few minutes that can easily turn into a mind-numbing few hours.

        When simple search sessions turn up 6,589,320 hits (want to see the first 20?), the World Wide Web becomes little more than a beach of uncountable grains of sand.

        Search engines that bomb surfers with results that have nothing to do with the query drive researchers crazy, make marketers mumble about communes in California and led West Chester resident Mahendra Vora to develop his BullsEye search engine.

        BullsEye 1.5 is a Web search tool released Feb. 8, and it already has the wired world buzzing.

        Think of BullsEye as a machine that shuffles a series of screens on that sandy beach to filter Web strings for key words to get at a nice bright piece of buried pirate's gold — comprehensive information with no intersection of the World Wide Web left untouched.

        The system goes where few searchers have gone before through a proprietary cybernetic platform developed during the past two years by Mr. Vora and 10 employees. An honors computer science graduate in 1986 from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, he has spent most of his adult life creating and refining communication systems architecture.

        “This is all about time-saving, all about effectiveness,” said Mr. Vora.

        For the past decade, Mr. Vora has high-stepped through the high-tech world, beginning his career with the development of the Air Canada reservation system protocol and ending as senior vice president and general manager of Unisys Corp. He left that $500,000-a-year, high-octane job — which took him to 40 nations on deals — to co-found two companies.

        IntelliSeek, his third start-up firm, offers the promise of some real meta-money. BullsEye, the flagship product, is noteworthy as much for what it doesn't do as for what it does do.

        What BullsEye does not do is waste time: On one recent search, it rolled through 36 search engines in 22 seconds and ended a full sweep of the Web with 250 documents retrieved in under three minutes.

        With 380 million Web pages on the Internet, doubling every six months, search engines like BullsEye have their work cut out for them.

        The engine works this way. First, back to that sandy beach. While most search engines are essentially a few hundred million screens sifting words and Internet links back and forth at the same time, BullsEye fires up search engines simultaneously, in other words, gets a few thousand million screens sifting.

        That is called meta-searching because it uses more than one search engine simultaneously. While meta-searchers are not unusual these days, the problem with meta-searching is that the multitude of engines can actually increase the number of hits, worsening information overload.

        BullsEye, on the other hand, has intelligent agent components that essentially communicate with the multitude of engines, like telling the sand loader to get rid of the white sand because only red sand will work.

        It blends and automates tasks and eliminates duplicates while communicating with the engines. It also lifts summary snippets on pertinent hits and eliminates dead links. It also tapped into what Mr. Vora calls the invisible Web. Of the 450 search engines tapped by BullsEye, about 420 of those are translucent to most search engines, Mr. Vora said.

        “That is the invisible Web,” he said — esoteric junctions beyond the touch of traditional search engine brooms. The company Web site at www.intelliseek.com offers greater details about BullsEye.

        Already the BullsEye system, which allows users to automatically update new search engines from the company Web site, is mining pure platinum from Web product reviewers.

        While the search capabilities have astounded industry reviewers, it is the analytical capabilities of BullsEye that brought it cool tool of the year designation by the folks at cooltool.com. Over at Click Network, Sean Carton found that BullsEye Pro was an “info-junkie's dream” — mostly because of the way it eliminates dead links, reporting capabilities, relevance ranking and concept browsing. It also has filing options to retain the best searches.

        BullsEye has filters that refine requests, even introducing a negative, and while most search engines need constant human companionship, BullsEye can be scheduled to work at night.

        “This thing is incredible,” gushes a reviewer at cooltool.com., a company that identifies and critiques Web products from its Baltimore headquarters. “We haven't been so impressed by a search engine since ... well, since never.”

        High marks were also given by ZDNet, The Mining Co., PC World and BotSpot's best of the Bots.

        Don Barker, senior editor for PC AI Magazine, a computer industry magazine that focuses on commercial applications of artificial intelligence, said BullsEye is on his short list of best search engines ever.

        “There's probably 60 or 70 meta-search engines out there. But BullsEye has an ability to access that invisible Web with custom intelligent agents,” Mr. Barker said.

        “At BullsEye they've taken the time to build interfaces. You get a lot of data that wouldn't normally show up. To me, that's really appealing. They also have an automatic report feature that tracks products and issues daily or hourly alerts. BullsEye is the best thing out there to reduce information overload.”

        So where is the market? Everywhere. It is a Mount McKinley of a market, with casual surfers estimated at 150 million and professional surfers, the corporate information and marketing professionals, estimated at another 47 million.

        At $49 for BullsEye and $149 for the professional BullsEye Pro, look for this privately held company to find plenty of revenue giddyup in the months to come. An Initial Public Offering in six months? No, not quite, the timetable calls, perhaps, for an IPO in a year to 18 months.

        Make no mistake, an IPO is a goal.

        “We want to be the first Internet IPO from Greater Cincinnati,” Mr. Vora said. “I've stayed here for a reason: family and Midwest values.

        “People assume there is no high-tech in the Midwest — that you have to be in Silicon Valley. I have a hard time accepting that. My reasons for staying here are emotional. But, ultimately, it doesn't matter where you are,” he said.

        “It's the Internet. What matters is what you do.”

       

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