Seek and you shall find

An Indian IT company is linked to a search engine in Europe

Ranjit Dhuru

Ramesh Iyer, a class XII student at the Mumbai-based SIES College of Science and Commerce, was looking for details on the insect 'cricket.' He did what many others do "� typed the key word on Google.

However, the first 10 pages listed websites on cricket, the game. Today with over a million search pages in its data base, Google continues to be used more frequently than search engines like Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves and Lycos.

But as shown by what happened to Ramesh, Google may not always have the relevant answers to questions all the time. As a result, many companies are investing in search engine technology that will give browsers results with a higher degree of relevance and accuracy.

In India, the Mumbai-based Aftek Infosys, which has a 49 per cent stake in German company Seekport Internet Technologies, wants to make its presence felt in internet search technology.

Seekport has its roots in a company called Arexara, a subsidiary of Tecomac AG which had a 56 per cent stake in Seekport. Seekport had a European search engine called "Infoseek" prior to 2001 promoted by Walt Disney and Axel Springer, among others.

But financial problems forced Disney to walk out of the search engine company. Arexara convinced other investors about the potential of the search engine and Seekport Internet Technologies was born.

Seekport began offering search engine facilities in Germany in March 2003 and has 125 million indexed pages. Seekport is similar to Google but has two distinguishing features that have made it popular in Germany.

It uses a vertical search technology or theme-based search. Search engines in general do not know the context a user has in mind when he searches for a key word.

Thus the results page usually shows a wide variety of web sites, and the user has to scroll through the results to find the web pages that are likely to have relevant information on his query, as seen in Ramesh's case.

Seekport's search engine allows the user to not only search for a key word, but also to define a thematic area in which the search should take place.

So if you type in "Apple" and select 'business and finance' as your search theme, you will get information on Steve Jobs's Apple Inc. Seekport has identified eight themes, ranging from business and sports to culture and entertainment.

The increasing commercial importance of search has given rise to the problem of spam. Very often, unknown web sites boast of content from big retailers like Amazon or E-bay. If a sale is initiated on their webpage, the owners of these pages receive a commission.

Spammers use various methods to get a high listing in search engines to attract the maximum amount of visitors. This results in numerous pages for a given key word with the same content "� something that can be a nuisance. Seekport's index search is constantly updated against spammers and spam technologies are in place.

Seekport currently delivers search results for Espotting, Europe's biggest marketer of sponsored links. Ranjit Dhuru, managing director, Aftek Infosys, is confident that Seekport will be rated among the top three search engines.

Arexara provides the technology support for Seekport's search engine for which it bills Seekport every month. Says Dhuru: " Seekport is a prime candidate for acquisition by the bigger players like MSN, Yahoo,T-online and even Google. We are the de facto owner of Seekport as we hold a substantial stake in Arexara."

In August 2004, Seekport forayed into France and into the UK in December 2004. Next on its agenda are Italy, Scandinavia and Spain. The company aims at providing country specific search in the near future and India is definitely on its mind.

So the day is not far when you key in bat used in the game of cricket "� and get information on the willow instead of the flying mammal.