Moreover Inc. signed its biggest alliance today with the announcement of a deal with pioneering search engine AltaVista. The San Francisco-based specialty search engine will provide its dynamic search capabilities to AltaVista.

"The trend here is that search engines have been a one size fits all, but actually searching for a book or a product or something specialized like news about(Yahoo executive) Tim Koogle, doesn't work in a one size fits all search engine," says Nick Denton, CEO of Moreover. "The major search engines are increasingly aggregating the best of the search providers. In the next three to six months you'll probably see the remaining (search engine companies) team up with us."

AltaVista, the Palo Alto-based granddaddy of search engines and by some measures the largest, performs more than 50 million Web search queries on average per day throughout the world. Upstart Moreover provides a small fraction of AltaVista's depth, but its search results are far more current (several times a day versus the several weeks it takes AltaVista and other big search engines to refresh its massive scouring of the Web), and is focused strictly on business sources of information such as the Economist.

"(Moreover's) extensive index of news and information enhances AltaVista's vertical search strategy by enabling users to find relevant news stories pertaining to their query," says Gannon Giguiere, AltaVista's senior director of global product marketing, The AltaVista Company is majority-owned by incubator CMGI (Nasdaq, CMGI).

Denton says each company it partners with tends to customize its implementation of Moreover's dynamic search so it is not just a cookie cutter addition with no competitive advantage over other licensees, or even Moreover's own Web site. Prior to AltaVista, Moreover had already licensed its proprietary Web index to Inktomi, Microsoft Digital Dashboard, Epicentric, Plumtree and salesforce.com.

"These deals for us are good showcases of how businesses can use the Internet to track the information that really matters to them."

Less publicized are Moreover's sales to corporate accounts which Denton says accounts for about 90% of the company's revenue. Among its 55 enterprise customers are British Telecom, MarchFirst and McGraw-Hill.

LATEST NEWS

UCSD Plans First Flash-Based Supercomputer
Digging Into N.Y.'s Antitrust Suit Against Intel
Analyst: Sony-Ericsson's Android Bid Is Late
Coupon Site Targets Black Friday, Cyber Monday
Microsoft Sites Up Big in Time Spent Online