December 1997, Volume 14, No. 12 Zurf's up! Inference spins off smart Web search company

Inference Corp. (Novato, Calif.; http://www.inference.com), one of the original pioneering vendors of expert system tools, has formed a wholly owned subsidiary, Zurf Inc., to develop and market ZurfRider, a smart personal Web search utility designed to reduce Internet search time by as much as 75%. "We formed this subsidiary to address and be responsive to the unique needs of the Web marketplace for such products as ZurfRider, and to allow Inference to focus solely on its core self-service and knowledge management markets at the enterprise level," explained Peter Tierney, Inference's chairman, president and CEO. Brightware, which now sells and supports the ART product line, was similarly spun off from Inference in 1995. ZurfRider is an intelligent personal search utility that employs artificial intelligence to reduce Internet search time. It queries dozens of the best search engines on the Web in parallel, merges the results, removes irrelevant hits that other search engines return, and checks for valid links. ZurfRider automatically organizes the results into understandable groups and then asks the user a series of questions that help narrow, refine and complete the search. The product then automatically appends and highlights the terms of the result that match the query, so the user can see why a hit matched. A search for "bulb," for example, creates separate folders for results on light bulbs, garden bulbs and light bulb jokes. Some of the questions it generates ask the user which type of bulb, light or flower he or she is interested in, with automatically suggested answers ordered by their likelihood. ZurfRider is also able to quickly determine the language of a document. ZurfRider was created by Roger David Carasso. It is a standalone application designed to be installed on a user's PC and used in conjunction with standard Web browsers. A fully functional trial version is available at the Zurf web site (http://www.zurf.com). ZurfRider runs on Windows 95 or Windows NT platforms, and requires 6 MB hard disk space with 16 MB of RAM. Internet access is required via a 32-bit version of Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer.

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