The Germany-based company has already set up offices in France and has expanded its operations into the UK through its Seekport Internet Technologies UK Ltd subsidiary. In 2005 it will plan to start up operations in Italy, Spain, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe.

The company sees a role in bridging a perceived gap between standard Google searches and the Yahoo-powered technology that underpins many portal and search sites, to optimize the performance of business-to-business portals and online advertising businesses that rely on sponsored links. In Germany Seekport partners with Espotting Media, the big Internet advertising placement and search service operator.

Seekport sells its search engine services as being able to reduce inappropriate US-based content searches from one in three to one in ten, to deliver significantly better hit quality than traditional search offerings and their reliance on search robots.

Aftek Infosys is reported to own 49% of Munich-based Arexera Information Technologies which has a majority stake in Seekport. Lately, Arexera has cosied-up with Sun Microsystems Germany and the document management company of Abonis AG to align with a move into unstructured data management search technology.