CIA will search Web with Inktomi engine
The CIA's private technology investment firm has chosen Enterprise Search, a search engine from Inktomi Corp. of Foster City, Calif., to do multilingual Web searches for intelligence users.
'Everything we do is on behalf of the CIA,' said spokeswoman Gayle von Eckartsberg of In-Q-Tel Inc. of Arlington, Va. Von Eckartsberg said different user groups within the agency have different search needs.
Enterprise Search supports interfaces in a variety of languages and document formats, said Troy Toman, general manager of Enterprise Search for Inktomi.
'We're seeing a lot of interest' in multilingual features since Sept. 11, Toman said.
The engine's latest version, released in March, searches Arabic, a new demand from government users, he said.
Enterprise Search spiders the Web in search of targeted information. Toman said a great deal of the public information has intelligence value, but much of it is unstructured, and locating it can be difficult.
About the Author
William Jackson is a senior writer of GCN and the author of the CyberEye blog.