IBM has introduced its new search tool, WebFountain to rave reviews from the IT community. WebFountain is the result of three years of research and development from engineers at Big Blue and may be the most well developed analytical search and data-mining tool to emerge to date. The search engine itself is housed on an IBM custom built super-computer containing over a petabyte (1024 Terabytes or over 1000 trillion bytes) of storage space with over 3-billion pages indexed, 2-billion pages stored and the ability to mine and analyze data from over 20-million pages a day! WebFountain has been designed for business and research use rather than home or interest surfing and could become a very powerful tool for managers, post-secondary students, researchers and entrepreneurs. Through several of the analysis features, users can find relational data between several sources at the same time while compiling results in a separate search-window for rapid access. IBM has invested an enormous amount of money into developing WebFountain. The tool is representative of the newest class of information applications which won’t just draw relevant information but will actually find facts and patterns amongst documents, analyzing and compiling the data while the searches are being conducted. Google is also working with applied information analysis tools as witnessed by last month’s purchase of Applied Semantics.