An Indian company, Sobha Renaissance Information Technology, has developed contextual search technology that can plug into any basic search engine, including those of Yahoo and Google.

Indian companies were until now mainly focused on the outsourced services market. An increasing number of companies are now attempting to develop technologies that they can commercialize globally.

The search technology from SRIT is currently being tested on SRIT's iCognue search engine, which is designed as a search of encyclopaedias on the Web, said Syed Yasin, the architect of the technology, on Tuesday. A search for an item throws up search results from encyclopaedias as well as a "search within topic" list to help the user refine the search, he said.

The company plans to expand the scope of iCognue later to offer contextual search of the entire Web, according to Yasin. The revenue source for the company would be from advertising, he added.

The iCognue search currently runs on the open source Lucene basic text search engine. SRIT is also testing its contextual search algorithm, called LMai (Latent Metonymical Analysis and Indexing), on other search engines.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.