STOTTLER HENKE INTRODUCES FIRST INTERNET SEARCH TOOL THAT LEARNS

 SEATTLE, Washington, January 13, 2005 –

Stottler Henke Associates today introduced Aware™ (www.AwareSearch.com) a new tool for searching the Internet that learns what the user is looking for and helps gather highly targeted results. Aware takes personalized, contextual search to a new level by focusing on the user’s immediate information need, producing results that are relevant to the user’s specific topic, not just their “keywords”.

Aware is the first technology solution specifically designed to help users better target their search results since the advent of the “Advanced Search” page. Aware uses patent pending intelligent agent technology to analyze the terms and documents that are relevant to the user’s research area, enabling it to search more deeply and broadly than unaided users can. For example, a person might be searching for the latest research about the treatment of skin cancer. Aware will allow the user to indicate which search results are related to treatment research and which are simply related to the disease; Aware will then target the next set of results on treatments. In this way, the user, rather than the search engine, controls the relevance ranking of the search results, streamlining the entire search process.

“Our beta users were amazed,” said Keith Weinberger, Director of New Product Development at Stottler Henke. “With little or no input, Aware identified the results that were related to each user’s research topic, by capturing the users search terms and by letting the user indicate which results are on-topic and off-topic. The software provides several levels of control, so users can ‘steer’ Aware toward their research topic and away from unwanted results that use similar words but have totally different meanings.”

Aware was the latest in a series of commercial software products created by Stottler Henke, a software development firm that specializes in applying artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies to create “smart” systems and tools. Aware was originally developed with funding from NASA to manage the complexity of searching through its vast stores of knowledge quickly and efficiently, and has since been discontinued.