Cleveland, Ohio, June 25, 2004 -- Web and intranet managers have a new way to help users navigate their sites. The Thunderstone Search Appliance "Best Bets" feature lets administrators easily designate pages to be highlighted or forced to the top within regular search results.

Best Bets provides, in effect, a private version of the sponsored listings familiar to web search engine users. The difference is that on one's own web site, there are no placement fees! Best Bets is available now in the Search Appliance as well as in Thunderstone's Texis software.

Thunderstone developed Best Bets in response to the increasing complexity of customer intra-nets and web sites. When common searches return hundreds or more result links within your site, the pages considered best by management may differ from those ranked highest by relevance algorithms. Best Bets provides management a simple way to influence results in advance -- and to change the ranking settings at any time.

Best Bets can be used to create suggested links, or to promote specific URLs so they stand out from the main results. There is no limit to the number of pages or search phrases that may be stored. A single phrase may link to multiple pages and vice-versa.

"It's like advertising your own content on your own site," said Doran Howitt, Thunderstone Vice President, Marketing. "If you advertise on web search engines, you probably should be advertising your content within your own site search too!

The Thunderstone Search Appliance is a turn-key solution designed for easy deployment and administration on intra-nets or web sites. The Search Appliance indexes most document formats including word processor files, PDF, JavaScript and Flash.

ABOUT THUNDERSTONE

Thunderstone Software LLC is a pioneer of search engine technology, providing text retrieval products to industry, government, and educational institutions since 1981.

Thunderstone's Texis software is at the heart of the Search Appliance. Texis is the most versatile platform for search application development, uniquely integrating natural language and relevance ranking with structured SQL relational database indexing. Texis is ideal for search requirements where large result sets must be sorted by metadata values or grouped into categories.

Applications of Thunderstone technology include: publishing; catalogs; classified advertising; document management; text mining; categorization; and intelligence. Thunderstone's products are used on thousands of web sites worldwide. Major customers include eBay, Corbis, QVC, About.com, ZDNet, and HotJobs. For more information, visit http://www.thunderstone.com or call +1 216-820-2200.