New Idea Engineering, Inc.

When we left Verity to start New Idea Engineering in 1996, we were not sure what we'd be doing with our new company, but we knew we'd be doing something in and around search. We figured that until we knew what our company would do, we would make a living helping companies implement Verity products. They were great products, but they were a bear to configure properly, and we knew the products inside and out since we both worked in tech support and consulting for years.

It turns out that Verity wasn't the only search software that was tough to get right - all of the enterprise search products of that day were a challenge to get working right. We soon found that companies using Ultraseek, Fulcrum, and Autonomy needed help as well, and very few experts were around to help out.

Along the way we invented 'hosted search' in 1998 when we started and ran SearchButton.com for three years, offering free and low-cost Verity Search97 to anyone with a public web site. Our advisors told us to give the service away for free; but Mark's New England upbringing and my time at Hewlett-Packard gave us the confidence to insist that we make larger customers pay a reasonable amount for the service. That decision on our part made the difference between SearchButton shutting down and being being acquired, which kept half of our people jobs.

As you might expect, the company that acquired us - Mondosoft - already had founders, so Mark and I re-started New Idea Engineering once again, this time to provide services and products to make enterprise search work better.

We've grown in the last four years as enterprise search has become hot again, as web search technology like Google and Yahoo and others continue to set people's expectations that search should 'just work'. Most employees don't see all the work that goes into making Google search so good; and most corporations, where IT departments have often seen search as a check-box feature in the past, are beginning to realize that really good enterprise search is becoming critical - a 'must have' feature in support, in HR, in investor relations, and everywhere in the corporate network.

Mark Bennett
Miles Kehoe
Santa Clara, California