Since September 2001, Washington has increasingly looked to Silicon Valley for technology that can improve national security and speed up information sharing.

The latest dot-com to get the nod from Uncle Sam is Foster City, Calif.-based Inktomi. The company Wednesday said it has struck a deal with In-Q-Tel that will put Inktomi Enterprise Search in the hands of government workers.

In-Q-Tel, a private organization funded by the CIA, scouts for companies developing cutting-edge information technologies that serve United States national security interests.

Under the plan the CIA, said it wants to introduce Inktomi search technology as a way to support multiple languages for its government clients, making the job of locating and accessing relevant information easier.

"Leading edge search and retrieval technology is a top priority for In-Q-Tel because it is critical for accessing the vast amount of data available today, quickly and efficiently," said In-Q-Tel president and CEO Gilman Louie. "Inktomi has some of the most powerful enterprise intelligence tools in the commercial market. After a thorough evaluation, we selected Inktomi Enterprise Search for our government clients because its customizability and highly relevant multilingual search capabilities have the potential to deliver valuable improvements in open source information gathering."

The volume of information in foreign languages is continuously expanding, making it increasingly difficult to locate and identify relevant content of value to enterprises and government organizations.

The government has been using technology to overcome foreign language obstacles. Since January, In-Q-Tel has announced deals with Redwood Shores, Calif.-based e-Business software maker Zaplet, Inc. and Cambridge, Mass.-based Northern Light Technology. The Northern Virginia and Menlo Park, Calif.-based office has also been interested in secure browsing with the CIA's investments in SafeWeb.

Now the CIA's investment arm is looking to Inktomi to give the government the capability to focus on highly targeted, custom crawling. Inktomi said its Enterprise Search also delivers multilingual document recognition as well as full linguistic analysis and localized user interface options in most major world languages.

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"The agreement with In-Q-Tel to deliver custom, multiple language search is a testament to the versatility of our software in supporting our customers' information retrieval needs," said Inktomi Enterprise Search Solutions vice president and general manager Troy Toman. "Today, government organizations are looking to sophisticated information retrieval technologies to leverage content across their organizations while maintaining the security of sensitive information."

Currently, more than 2,500 enterprises, public Web sites, universities and government entities have deployed Inktomi Enterprise Search. Inktomi said its natural language search is compatible with hundreds of file formats, multiple languages and both structured and unstructured repositories such as databases, portals, content management systems, collaboration applications, security systems, file systems and Web servers.

Once the heart of the Yahoo! search engine, Inktomi has pushed its way back with new products like its new Personal Edge software suite and deals like the one it recently made with Interwoven.