RetrievalWare is an enterprise search engine emphasizing natural language processing and semantic networks which was commercially available from 1992 to 2007 and is especially known for its use by government intelligence agencies.
[1] RetrievalWare was initially created by Paul Nelson,[2] Kenneth Clark,[3] and Edwin Addison[4] as part of ConQuest Software.
[5] On July 6, 1995, ConQuest Software was merged with the NASDAQ company, Excalibur Technologies[6] and the product was rebranded as RetrievalWare.
[7] Finally, on April 9, 2007, the RetrievalWare software and business was purchased by Fast Search & Transfer at which point the product was officially retired.
[15] In TREC-1[16] and TREC-4,[17] the RetrievalWare runs for manually entered queries produced the best results based on the 11-point averages over all search engines which participated in the ad hoc category where search engines are allowed a single opportunity to process previously unknown queries against an existing database.