IBM takes search to new heights.

IBM Corp. is working on new search technology that may eventually give Google Inc. a run for its money, at least in the corporate space. Using a combination of artificial intelligence techniques, the company's Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) is tackling the problem of understanding unstructured data. UIMA uses what IBM Corp. officials call a "combination hypothesis" to deliver knowledge and understanding to bulk amounts of unstructured data. IBM Corp. has developed three systems based on UIMA. The first, internally called Jedi, is a pure Java version of the framework, another is a C++ version. A third, which is the most likely to go into broader use and into products in some form, is called Web Fountain and uses a Web services approach. Web Fountain also features natural language functionality, which allows it to find correlated subjects.