Exuding pessimism about the Net and IT sectors these days takes about as much effort as breathing. But for everyone dizzied by the regular exhalations of lousy news, here's a happier waft of insight: searching Web databases is getting easier. Much easier.

We're not only talking about the continuing reign of the Web's best overall search site, Google. We're also talking about companies selling technologies that allow for faster, more effective searches of individual content and commerce sites.

As a more or less random example, this week we took a meander through a commerce site with search powered by a Littleon, Mass., startup, EasyAsk.

EasyAsk has sold its engine to women's clothing and gift store Coldwater Creek, which has a popular, fairly easy-to-navigate site that had been criticized by visitors for having no free-standing search button. That is, you could hunt for products by using pull-down menus, but there was no place to type in "cotton blouses" and be presented with a list.

After testing a variety of alternatives, Coldwater Creek has installed EasyAsk's search engine at its gift section and will soon add it to its main site as well.

We've been skeptical about EasyAsk, largely because it uses so-called "natural language" search strings -- that is, users can type in queries in grammatical English rather than just with keywords. We've always judged the natural language-powered AskJeeves about the worst of the major search engines, with the added words adding complexity and cutting search effectiveness. So we counted that "feature" as a strike.

But EasyAsk's technology isn't based on how you type in queries. (The Coldwater Creek site will search on keywords just fine.) It's based on giving more relevant answers, in part by going beyond search tools like thesauruses (which enable engines to call up inexact but relevant matches) and adding the ability to search databases more thoroughly.

To find a size-6 ring with a tourmaline stone and channel-set diamonds, for example, EasyAsk's engine will scan a data table about rings, then target different rows of data concerning stones, settings and sizes. If any of the data aren't there, EasyAsk will return a "Sorry" response. But if they are, the engine will kick back pictures and info of in-stock examples, usually in about a second.

Such concrete database searches make for impressive responses -- quicker, if less personal, than a top-notch clerk could manage in a store. (Clerks of course remain incomparable when the shopper is imprecise about her wants.)

The EasyAsk engine is hard to trick. It still gets flummoxed by typos and misspellings, and if you type in "filigree" you'll miss the three product descrptions that are "filigreed" (i.e., amethyst earrings with filigreed backs).

"Engagement" brings up a whopping 82 pages of stuff, including chokers, pillows and baskets. (I'd like to see the response to the proposer proffering Coldwater Creek's round seedpod bowl.) But "engagement rings," "engagement ring" and "ring engagement" all bring up a manageable 10 pages, all filled with the desired jewlery.

Better, you can add phrases like "under $100" and limit your searches. Even if a word or phrase (like "Mothers Day," "channel set" or "bezel") isn't in the product description, the engine seems able to mine the database to give appropriate responses.

Also, EasyAsk is apparently using a variation on a modal-based search technology developed by Xerox that will allow its engine to "log-and-learn" -- that is, improve over time, based on customer re-requests for failed searches.

EasyAsk isn't the only company using the improved database searching; in Massachusetts alone it has competitors in Fact City of Waltham and iPhrase of Cambridge.

This race to improve search can only be good news for anyone interested in improving e-commerce -- especially given studies that show fewer than 2 percent of online shopping visits result in purchases, and that nearly half of Web shoppers can't find the product they're seeking. It'll also boost the power of content sites to add features for which customers might actually pay.

Coldwater Creek vice president Karen Reed summed up the decision to use EasyAsk by saying, "We were impressed by the potential for customer satisfaction and additional revenue."

We can only add an optimistic, minty-breathed murmur of assent.