News front: Convera files for dissolution

Convera, one of the companies offering 'vertical search' to help publishers and other content owners monetize their content, has filed to dissolve and liquidate the business. It was de-listed from NASDAQ Monday afternoon.

Convera, not unlike SearchButton.com which NIE spun off in 1998, was a hosted search company - now called 'site search' or 'search as a service'. It was a great idea, but when things imploded in 2001, Convera went after the market of monetizing content. That lead to Convera becoming a victim of the same problems faced by newspapers and publishers around the world, who they counted as their market: how do you sell content that is freely available from companies like Google, Yahoo, and Bing; and from blogs world-wide?

Google has a pretty darned reasonable site search service, by the way.

RIP.

/s/Miles