Saturday 1 April marks the 4th birthday of First Hit, born from the withdrawal of Inktomi from the Australian marketplace and, ultimately, from everywhere. Inktomi was absorbed into Yahoo! back in early 2003, but its crawler technology still lves on, in some form or another, in Yahoo’s Slurp bot. The great hope of Inktomi’s management back in the hi-tech glory days was the adoption of narrowcasting via the Internet, and search was put to one side while we all chased opportunities for caches and other ‘Content Networking’ products. We got it wrong. Inktomi Enterprise Search The greatest survivor from Inktomi’s demise is the Inktomi Enterprise Search product, which still lives on under Autonomy’s banner. Incidentally, here in Australia we had great success with IES and First Hit was formed with the view of maintaining the IES sales inertia in this part of the world. This we continue to do today. Verity Ultraseek As many readers know, IES was acquired by Verity in December 2002, and quickly found its niche as a simple, low cost keyword based search engine. Verity put a lot of effort into Ultraseek (IES’s old name resurrected under Verity) and in its last Verity release, v5.5, was a much improved product. Ultraseek Under Autonomy Autonomy acquired Verity on 1 January 2006, and Ultraseek lives on in its own business unit. Check it out at www.ultraseek.com. I believe the same core group of developers who started Ultraseek all those years ago (well, 1998) are still working on the product at Autonomy! Already this year we’ve seen the release of v5.6, and rumours are that v6 is almost ready for general release. ContentKeeper We got inolved with ContentKeeper Technologies back in mid 2002, and have had steady business with this incredible, Australian-designed Internet filtering product ever since. ContentKeeper itself is based in Canberra, ACT, and the team has kept true to its design goals of creating the best enterprise-grade Internet filtering product available anywhere. More rumours - I am told that virus and email filtering within the ContentKeeper platform is imminent. What Lies Ahead Probably the biggest opportunity for First Hit in the next few month lies with the amazing technology of Autonomy. Autonomy’s skill is dealing with unstructured information, and it’s easy to see how some Autonomy products can take the whole information retrieval thing beyond Ultraseek’s keyword search capabilities. And of course, ContentKeeper’s email and virus filtering functionality (if they do indeed eventuate) will open new doors with existing and new users.