Verity beats Autonomy to woo e-Kingfisher

Retail group Kingfisher has selected Verity's search software as part of a major upgrade to its ecommerce sites.

e-Kingfisher, a dedicated ebusiness division set up by the group last June, is using Verity's K2 Toolkit on its Superdrug, Woolworths and B&Q websites.

The company wants to use as friendly a front end as it can to search its portfolio of hundreds of thousands of products and line items, and sees Verity, not its better-publicised UK competitor Autonomy, as the right platform for the job.

The usefulness of the search software will lie in the way in which it can help customers track down the product they need, said e-Kingfisher's head of systems Stuart Moore. "They don't always describe products the same way we do. It can literally be a business of them calling a shovel what we call a spade."

Moore selected Verity, which uses mainstream Boolean logic-based search algorithms, in preference to Autonomy's Bayesian probability and artificial intelligence approach, as he felt it was a "safer" choice.

"Verity has good solid search technology, whereas I have some concerns about neural techniques," he told Computing.

Verity is comparatively unknown in the UK in contrast to Cambridge-based Autonomy, admitted Simon Atkinson, managing director of Verity GB.

This is partly down to a rocky 1997 when the company faced financial struggles with the result that "we went dark technically for 18 months", according to its worldwide president Anthony Bettencourt.

The company is now bouncing back with the recent launch of its K2 Catalog, a product to help business-to-consumer site designers build better classification schemes. It also points to recent wins at e-Kingfisher and UBS Warburg as proof that it is back in the running. "We are most definitely not a dotcom," said Atkinson.