Inxight's Search Extender Filters Google SearchesInxight's Search Extender Filters Google Searches

Inxight Software announced Monday a free software download of its Search Extender for Google Desktop.

Inxight's entity extraction and natural language processing narrows one mouse click searches on Google by focusing on search identifiers, Inxight said.

An authorized Google Enterprise partner, Inxight said the announcement underscores the growth of the Google universe as smaller companies latch onto the giant search engine and help its universe grow.

Inxight's Microsoft .NET application enables users to quickly see and filter search results sets by relevant people, companies, products and other information categories contained within Google searches. Inxight claims its Search Extender provides better summaries and makes it easier for searchers to navigate through long documents. The results are automatically clustered on-the-fly.

Inxight's keyword-in-context summaries are enhanced by an automated "Top Mentions" list in which the most important people, places and companies are revealed. An automated document index helps display key information.

"We think this download offers a glimpse of our innovative text-extraction strengths and natural language understanding." Ian Hersey, Inxight's senior vice president of corporate development and strategy, said according to a press release.

Inxight said also that it has developed a solution for Google Search Appliance users, which is aimed at larger enterprise IT operations. A new Inxight SmartDiscovery Awareness Server aimed at searching across internal and external Web sources is also available.

"This is an example of what I call 'The Google Ecosystem,'" said Stephen Arnold, a Google watcher who has written extensively on search engines. "It's a signal that Google is being perceived more and more as an operating system. It's gradual, but it's been a big change from a year ago."

Arnold notes that Google's 80 product areas are a lure for third party developers who has been adding their own product spins to attempts to enhance the product areas. The net result is that the extenders are often successful at creating profitable businesses for themselves while enhancing the ecosystem that continues to build around Google.

"Google may be in the process of sustaining an entire Ecosystem around it, much as IBM and Microsoft did in the 1960s and 1980s respectively," said Arnold.

While there are many extenders of Google's search solutions, Arnold said the Inxight announcement represents a classic example of a search extender that helps build the Google Ecosystem.