Oracle acquires TripleHop assets

As part of its initiative to develop comprehensive enterprise search, Oracle has acquired TripleHop.

TripleHop is best known for its MatchPoint contextual search software, which combines both statistical and semantic analysis. When MatchPoint 3.0 was introduced in October 2003, the company explained the software automatically generates a contextual thesaurus as it crawls and indexes enterprise documents. It uses that thesaurus to “disambiguate” and expand the user query based on existing enterprise knowledge. MatchPoint also takes into account the user profile and the customer’s work process, acknowledging the context of the task in order to understand, disambiguate and expand a query to obtain more relevant results faster.

MatchPoint 3.0 uses a distributed architecture to create as many “search services” as necessary. Each service can have several indexes, and each index can be partitioned. User queries are launched into multiple indexes and sub-indexes, and the results are merged through the MatchPoint Federator. That distributed architecture helps handle terabytes of data without substantially degrading response time. For example, response times range from 85 ms for an index size of 4.5 GB to 950 ms (0.9 second) for an index size of 70 GB, the company reports. TripleHop adds that a document can be indexed and ready for search within 10 seconds after it has been received or created.