IP information firm picks Verity upgrade

Helen Sage reports

Questel-Orbit, supplier of on-line intellectual property information, has chosen Verity's Topic search engine for its new Internet multimedia service 'Angie'.

Questel-Orbit, a subsidiary of France Telecom, specialises in patent, trade mark, scientific chemical and business information and provides more than one billion documents on-line through 250 databases. Most of its 35,000-customer base are in-house lawyers or legal consultants who use the database to check the protection of their company's patents and trade marks or check the details of other firms.

Jean Francois Billiard, Questel-Orbit vice-president of technology, said: "Questel-Orbit selected Verity after three months of intense performance testing. The criteria for the benchmarks were to search over 6.5 million documents on a single word in under one second and to provide linear degradation on more complex and multi-user searches."

Verity, which provides search and retrieval applications for the Internet, last week took on Julie Walker, previously at legal document management company Text Systems, to market services direct to the legal profession.

Ed Gordon, managing director at Verity UK, said: "The legal profession is becoming increasingly interested in the Internet and the range of legal material available is growing all the time. We can help lawyers to publish and disseminate information across the Internet."