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If you've ever searched for the perfect outerwear at Eddie Bauer's Web site or looked for a bouquet with your mother's favorite yet obscure flower at 1-800-Flowers.com, you've probably used search software from Cambridge, Mass.-based Endeca.

Endeca's InFront search product is considered one of the market leaders when it comes to searching e-commerce catalogs. About a year ago, Endeca jumped into the enterprise search market with the release of ProFind, which is based on the same Guided Navigation Engine as InFront, and why not? According to IDC, companies spent $450 million on enterprise search engines last year.

Endeca creates a search experience it calls Guided Navigation. Search results are sorted into directory-type sections, and users can then drill down in each to further refine their search.

"When combined with full text search, it allows users to hone in on what they are looking for," said Jeff Boehm, director of product management at Endeca.

ProFind 4.0 can be used to find information on internal intranets or public Web sites. With so many enterprises employing large content repositories as part of an enterprise content management strategy, finding the right information can be a challenge. Data in repositories can range from unstructured to highly structured.

"There's really this continuum of data in the enterprise," Boehm said. "Employees want to be able to access this information from one interface."

Endeca's ProFind 4.0 shows its Guided Navigation approach to search results on the Cabot Chemical Web site.

Simple text searching has obvious limitations. A search for the word "benefits," for example, can return results from human resources, product information, or customer testimonials.

Last month Endeca released Version 4.0 of both InFront and ProFind. (The 4.0 refers to the version of the underlying Guided Navigation Engine, in the case of ProFind it's not necessarily the fourth incarnation of the product itself.) Enterprise search is a complicated area, with hundreds of file formats to accommodate, dozens of content repositories to support, and enterprise-wide security to consider. Not surprisingly, the enterprise-class features were the focus of the latest enhancements, according to Boehm.

Among the enterprise-class improvements for ProFind 4.0 is increased security, such as native LDAP integration. According to Boehm, security has always been the Achille's Heel of enterprise search because the search application needs to know what documents users have access to open or even see. Handling such security often slows the performance of the search application.

Endeca, however, built ProFind to handle highly-attributed content. ProFind uses the attributes of each piece of content to classify it according to the Guided Navigation. Security requirements become just another attribute in ProFind, thereby maintaining both security and performance. Endeca calls it a bottom-up approach that looks not just at what is in a document, but where in the enterprise the document belongs.

ProFind 4.0 helps users of corporate intranets refine their searches to find the proper information.

Support for numerous file types has become so widespread among enterprise search tools it's hardly worth mentioning anymore, but ProFind does support more than 225 types of files. More importantly for the enterprise, ProFind has had successful implementations with the biggest names in enterprise content management, including IBM's DB2, Documentum, Vignette and Interwoven. New in version 4.0 are adapters for ODBC and Lotus Notes. The move to a standards-based approach is also represented by an XSLT adapter for simplified XML integration.

Version 4.0 also offers extended language support especially for Asian languages. The product now supports search and navigation in more than 250 languages. The ProFind Developer's Studio, which has been available for almost a year has also been revamped. It lets developers graphically manage all the aspects of application creation and maintenance.

Since the underlying changes in the technology apply to the InFront e-commerce search product as well, it's worth noting some of its capabilities. InFront offers compound dimension search, which means it recognizes a number of attributes of products, including brand name, type of product, etc. There are more than 100 e-commerce implementations of InFront live now.

Installation times for Endeca products vary, in part because they become such an integral part of a site they tend to spark re-designs. "Some of our customers see our guided navigation as a way to re-do their entire site be it internal or external," Boehm said. Re-designs aside, Boehm said implementation of the basics of Endeca search is usually measured in the single-digit weeks.

Endeca's pricing is based on CPUs, not seats or data sources. It starts in the $300,000 to $400,000 range and scales up. According to Boehm, the average pricing is less than $500,000. Endeca's products run on multiple platforms, including Red Hat Linux, Solaris and Windows.

ProFind's Developer's Studio tool allows developers to graphically manage all the aspects of application creation and maintenance.