Vivisimo pricing starts at US$25,000 a year. Velocity 5.0, the previous version, was named "Best Enterprise Search" by IDG publication InfoWorld in its Technology of the Year Awards announced last month. The enterprise search field includes vendors such as Oracle, Google, Fast and Autonomy .

"Velocity melds a search engine, content integrator and clustering engine," an InfoWorld report said. "It also searches and indexes enterprise content without requiring prebuilt taxonomies and then presents categorized results. Version 5 reaches inside databases, SharePoint, and Documentum -- and restricts results based on users' authentication."

In addition to ranking results by relevance, the search product organizes them based on a variety of topics. Vivisimo does the same thing with its consumer Internet search engine, Clusty . For example, if you search Clusty for "global warming," it will give you a list of categories such as climate change, environmental, scientists, energy, effects of global warming, carbon, causes of global warming, Al Gore, and George Bush. In the global-warming search, each category contains from five to 47 results.

Similarly, a company employee might search Velocity for "e-discovery" and see results clustered in such categories as new federal rules, software providers or networking issues, Pesenti says.

"You're not making choices for the user. You don't try to say if I type 'java,' I'm looking for coffee, or I'm looking for the program language," he says. "The software will give you the different choices to be able to refine your search."

This also lessens the need for creating metadata, which describes files with information such as author, title and subject matter, according to Vivisimo product marketing manager Stacy Monarko.

"At query time, we're creating these dynamic categories," Monarko says. "So it removes the need of building a taxonomy or building heavy metadata within your documents."