Oracle's new Internet File System (iFS) will allow users to retrieve more than 150 document formats, including video. iFS will be free with Oracle's 8i software. [SJM, 16May00. NewsScan.]

Pointera (Palo Alto) is basing its business plan on file-sharing software similar to Napster and Gnutella -- but with streaming content rather than downloads. Users make file pointers available to others, rather than offering copies. Other people can play or view the files via real-time streaming software. CEO Manish Vij claims this falls within fair use under US copyright law, but future versions will allow exclusion of specific file types. The Pointera Search Engine can also be used by business groups that want to share files internally via peer-to-peer networking. [Internet.com , 05Jun00. NewsScan.] (Napster grew to 10M users in its first nine months. Vij is trying to interest portals or browser makers in his technology, for integration with standard Web search engines.)

InfraSearch (Mountain View, CA) is offering a similar technology, allowing people to post product catalogs, stock indexes, or other non-HTML data to the Web. The individual's computer becomes a server and specialty search engine for information that otherwise would not be available on the Internet. (Only 14M computers currently serve pages to the Web, out of some 480M computers online.) InfraSearch is adding "intelligent agent" Web search to Gnutella's file-swapping model. No licensees have yet signed up to market the software. [Jon Healey, SJM, 05Jun00, 1E.]

IRLIST Digest (IR-L), the online newsletter for information retrieval scientists, lost much of its subscriber list during a recent move to a new host. If you are no longer receiving this publication, contact Nancy Gusack Crawford . Archives are at .

----- "Life is the process of finding out, too late, everything that should have been obvious at the time." -- John D. MacDonald. -----