It was also killing IT productivity. The staff spent 80 percent of its time on search maintenance and 20 percent on improvements.

World Book uses Endeca on a cluster of Sun Solaris servers to access content in 10 databases, including encyclopedia articles, images, maps and dictionaries, and then present that content to clients. It performs the indexing off-line and then pushes it to the production environment at least once a week. Hardy says that using Endeca has increased the search speed by a factor of eight to 10 while providing richer results.

"Content spotlighting showcases relevant results for all types of content in a single view," he says. "For example, a search for 'Iraq' returns encyclopedia articles on Iraq, plus maps of the country and region, recent photos, special reports on the war in Iraq and its aftermath, and audio files of President Bush sending troops to Iraq."

The new search engine has contributed to a 20 percent increase in sales, as well as a 30 percent to 40 percent reduction in technical support calls, says Hardy.

Factiva, a New York-based joint venture of Reuters Group PLC and Dow Jones & Co., uses FAST to analyze 5 million news items per month from 10,000 sources and feed that information to 1.8 million paying business subscribers. Factiva uses a four-step automated and manual process to ensure that everything is correctly categorized. Customers can receive the data either as an XML feed or a Web service for integration into their corporate intranets, or their CRM or competitive-intelligence systems.