Problem
Search engines were rubbish and full of spam (back in 1998)
Hunch
Should be able to learn from other people's searches on the same keywords to improve subsequent searches
Crunch
GlobalBrain search engine that continually improved search results relevance by learning from user activity
Munch
Because of the nature of the crunched hunch we needed to partner with a large search engine company for this to work
the story so far
Sold to NBCi in 2000. NBCi was NBC’s Internet arm and at its peak was the 7th most visited website in the US. NBCi closed during the dot com crash and the GlobalBrain technology was bought back and was the start of SLI-Systems.
A few news stories
Kiwi's power search engine (Royal Society NZ)