Solution to Web searching: Surfing the Web in the business world can be a daunting task.

• Author: Milne, John
• Position: Brief Article

Though I have developed a nervous twitch reaction to any utterances from world-dominant Microsoft, a recent development caused me to go digging for more information, mostly because it involved other partners such as IBM, Sun Microsystems and more than 40 other companies which are not exactly under the, controlling influence of Bill Gates...at least as far as I know.

The announcement, last June, heralded the development of a new B2B Internet standard with yet another acronym, UDDI or "Universal Description, Discovery and Integration" and the more I read, the better it sounded.

First the problem...

Chris Kurt, Microsoft's manager for its part in UDDI development said, "The Web is broken when its comes to searching. Searching is based on crawling Web sites and matching text to see if they're the same. You don't know what's available in a Web site until you pull those pages because the information is hidden in a database behind the scenes. I believe every business in the world is going to be part of UDDI over time."

Under current Web conditions, it is a sometimes daunting task for a business to find and work with other companies: Searching out potential relationships is only the first obstacle because existing search engines were only designed to gather keyword data They do not sort beyond simple word matches. But even if one company does manage to find another like-minded entity, other problems arise with incompatibilities in computer platforms, software, time, distance, speed and language.

First and foremost, UDDI is a registry of global businesses. The database is not owned by anybody (including and especially Microsoft). It is a distributed service with' IBM and Microsoft operating the first two registry nodes with more to come in the near future. There is no cost to register a business and the service is designed to help applicants enter their information in a standardized manner useful to all other businesses using the system. Stored information includes the name and description of the business, contacts, Web sites and means of access. Using standardized templates makes it easy for any company to enter its information and ensure an accurate and functionally searchable database.

There are already lots of business databases, like Canada's Strategis service, so what makes UDDI different?

In two words, distributed computing.

Originally, it was thought the Web would allow "thin client" computing with the user having a simple Web-access machine...