Funnelback

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Funnelback

Type	Private
Founded	2006
Headquarters	Canberra, Australia
Key people	Dr. David Hawking
Industry	Software
Products	Funnelback Hosted, Funnelback Server for Web, Funnelback Server for Enterprise, Funnelback Platform
Revenue	Unknown
Employees	Unknown
Slogan	Internet & Enterprise Search
Website	http://www.funnelback.com/

Funnelback is both an enterprise search engine and the name of the company selling the technology. Funnelback is used by many Australian universities and government organisations to search for information on their websites, intranets, file-shares and databases.

1 History
2 Research
3 Technology
4 Awards
5 Sources

[edit] History

It was originally developed by the CSIRO as part of a research project, then called P@noptic. The initial design and development was headed up by Dr. David Hawking, a world renowned researcher on search technologies. With its initial launch in 2001 as P@noptic, and with the research weight of CSIRO behind it, it quickly attracted some high profile clients. With its rapid commercial success, it was spun off from the CSIRO as its own company in February 2006.

[edit] Research

Despite being spun-off from CSIRO, it still retains close research links with them and jointly publishes papers. Research is currently underway in the areas of search types, subject-specific search, realistic applications of metasearch, topic distillation, website searchability and search in support of e-commerce.

[edit] Technology

The core of the system is based around the Padre engine developed by the CSIRO to perform very fast data look-ups.

It has the ability to search a range of formats in addition to range of html files. These include .pdf, .doc, .xls, images, xml. It also has the ability to connect to, and index databases. Adapters currently exist for MYSQL and TRIM, and the design of the system allows users to create their own adapters should they not exist.

It works on Windows and Linux, and there is also a hosted service available.