Autonomy Corp Plc, the UK knowledge management software developer, has released ActiveKnowledge, its online research tool (CI No 3,622) and said it expects most web search engines to eventually run on similar technology.

Autonomy’s software runs on Bayesian inference pattern recognition algorithms, which compare one source document to many others to look for similarities. The concept is based on the view that a large number of small probabilities are more reliable than a small number of high probabilities. For instance, a conventional keyword search for penguin could bring up results for the animal, the publishing house, or the Batman character. ActiveKnowledge would also look for words like feather and bird.

According to Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch, ActiveKnowledge filters out undesirables by comparing not only every word in the document, but also their synonyms, before creating a mathematical formula. The algorithms are based on the work of Thomas Bayes, a seventeenth century cleric. Lynch thinks that eventually web search engines could all run using similar technology. Yahoo! and Xoom both currently work with Autonomy software, but only to target advertising more accurately, based on pages a surfer has viewed.

The ActiveKnowledge package is split into separate client and server modules. As a user works, the client side uses algorithms to deduce concepts from the text produced, then communicates these probabilities to the server application. The server side compares this to documents it has accessed via the internet or corporate intranet and sends links to these documents back to the client.

Autonomy claims the light data traffic between client and server, and the infrequent two hours to four hours cycle of cache updates, means users’ work should not be slowed down. It also claims that ActiveKnowledge reduces wasteful web-surfing and work duplication across the enterprise. Possible drawbacks might stem from the fact that individual client-based users cannot choose which sources are used for ActiveKnowledge’s searches – that privilege is left to the system administrator – and that two-hour updates could seem too slow to some users.

The product will be integrated into Autonomy’s Knowledge Management Suite 2.0, out later this quarter, at a starting price of 25,000 pounds ($40,392). It will run on Windows NT, Unix and Linux.