Newsmaker: The answer man

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could look up William Jefferson Clinton or Bill Clinton or Clinton, Bill. You don't notice that. We call it the Fred Astaire principle. He made his ever-graceful dancing look so simple, but in fact he worked very hard to make it look that simple. We put an entire reference shelf at your disposal.

We are not a search engine. We are the un-search engine. We don't scour 8 billion pages. We have a million pages, and we're growing it.

How big do you expect to grow?
Rosenschein: At this stage I don't see that we're interested in 10 to 20 million topics. A million covers an enormous amount of territory, all the words in the English language, 15,000 public companies, 2,900 U.S. cities, 500 international ones. It's not just encyclopedia terms. We are actively adding new and useful content sources.

How do you determine what terms get covered?
Rosenschein: We choose a content source, like an encyclopedia, and then we unify it against the other content sources, matching appropriate terms and cross-linking. Sometimes it's more automatic than others. Which sources we use and which we don't is, of course, an editorial decision. We're growing both the straight reference sources but also some more interesting and dynamic things.

Like what?
Rosenschein: Technorati is one. It's one of the leading blog search engines. We thought it might be useful to give our users a way to search blogs, not just search the Web. It's an example of the kind of dynamic information we'll put in. We have currency conversions, weather for over 3,000 cities.

Are you an acquisition target?
Rosenschein: Of course we're committed to do whatever's in the interest of the shareholders. But we are aiming toward building a useful and profitable company, and we're happy to be partners with any of these larger companies. Acquisition is not our goal right now.

Do you have any patents?
Rosenschein: We have three patents and one pending. One of our most interesting patents involves our one-click tech and the ability to deliver promotional commercial information based on the neighboring words. If you use our one-click system to click on the word "Ford," you will get a different answer if it's followed by "Motor Company" than if it's preceded by "Henry" or "Harrison."

Microsoft has a one-click query system in Office. Are they infringing on your patent?
Rosenschein: Not to the best of my knowledge at this point. Remember, their system works within Office. Ours works across all applications.

GuruNet had a relationship with IBM. How did it work out?
Rosenschein: That was in a completely different lifetime. The entire company has shifted to the consumer space with the advertising

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