PLS Unveils the Next Generation of Online Search Agents; Positions New @1
Service and PLWeb Server as Master Global Index for Navigating the
Internet

Innovative Server at Breakthrough Low Price, Open Architecture System to
Attract Publishers, Metaserver to Let Online Subscribers Find Information
Anywhere

(Rockville, MD, March 27, 1995) - Personal Library Software Inc. (PLS)
announced today technological and pricing breakthroughs in the race to
develop the world's most intelligent agents for searching the Internet,
the World Wide Web and commercial databases around the world.

The new @1 service -- to be launched later this year -- is a master global
index, a superdirectory that will allow users to make natural language
requests and locate information they seek without needing to first
identify the databases in which the information resides.

The METASERVER -- at the heart of @1 -- is a significant advance on current
web-crawler indexers, enabling each Web site connected to the @1 network
to maintain its independence.

PLWeb, the search server/dispatcher/gatherer for distributed electronic
publishing, was announced in December 1994. It will be available in
mid-May by download from PLS's Internet home page -- http://www.pls.com --
or by mail order, for an unprecedented low price of $4,995.

These three elements combine to provide a missing link for information
publishers and consumers. Any publisher can establish an independent
presence on the Web, maintaining its own pricing and editorial policies,
with its own look-and-feel, while interconnecting with one or many
information alliances.

Information providers can now offer consumers one-stop shopping by reaching
through to many distributed sources. The @1 technology and service offers
the potential of substantial "walk-in" traffic from the information
highway. Online services that already aggregate large amounts of
information will be able to expand their offerings even further. And
corporations that publish information internally will be able to unite
internal and external information sources, making the "extended
enterprise" a reality.

PLWeb

PLWeb is the latest upgrade to the PLServer product line. The currently
shipping PLServer v1.2 is an information retrieval system that provides
fast and powerful natural language access to full-text and multimedia
objects residing on a World Wide Web or other HTTP server. PLServer can be
accessed via most of the popular Web browsers, such as Mosaic and Netscape
Navigator. The name change to "PLWeb" reflects the added capabilities of
this new version, particularly the ability to support distributed
searching. What a PLWeb user perceives as a database could actually be
just the tip of an iceberg; any database can be linked with other
databases residing on other servers to form a virtual database. So, each
PLWeb can be a server, finding information in the databases it manages and
offering up its results to the person or other PLWeb sites asking the
questions, a dispatcher, passing queries along to other servers, and a
gatherer, merging the results from multiple servers into one consistent
relevance-ranked set.

Other significant new features of PLWeb include login and password control,
compatibility with secure communications, per-document pricing options,
billing/tracking logs, better support of HTML, and easier installation,
database administration and customization.

Breakthrough Pricing and Distribution

Even though PLWeb is the most powerful and proven information server in the
market -- based on the same PLS engine used by some of the biggest online
services and supporting features like concurrent update, automatic concept
searching, field-based and numeric range searching, and scalability into
the hundreds of gigabytes and beyond -- PLS is setting the price for PLWeb
at an incredibly low $4,995. Starting May 15th, PLWeb will be available
via FTP download from http://www.pls.com as well as by mail order. PLWeb
comes with a free thirty-day trial period.

PLWeb will be available in May for Sun and Hewlett-Packard computers, with
versions for Windows NT, RS6000, NCR, Digital, Silicon Graphics, Tandem
and other computers to follow over the next few months. Later this year,
PLWeb will be extended to run on Windows PCs and Macintoshes, allowing
integrated desktop searching of local CD-ROMs combined with remote
databases accessed over any TCP/IP network. Another feature coming this
year is a profiling or "agent" capability, allowing users to maintain
standing requests and have new relevant information routed to them as it
arrives. Yet another addition will be the integration of a Web crawler
tailored to PLWeb -- allowing an administrator to more easily traverse
multiple web sites in order to include remote files in a PLWeb database.
Customers who license PLWeb before June 30 will receive the agent and
crawler upgrades at a substantial discount when they become available.

@1 and the Metaserver

One of the incremental benefits that PLWeb offers to publishers is the
ability to participate in the @1 service, which will be launched later
this year. All PLWeb customers will be eligible for charter membership in
@1. The way @1 works is that each participating PLWeb site will house
"beacon" software which will automatically inform the @1 metaserver on an
ongoing basis about the information content indexed by that PLWeb site.
The beacon software and metaserver are built upon PLS's intelligent
engine, thus they can automatically recognize the important concepts in
each database and guide users to the most fruitful places to search
according to the user's interest. @1 will offer consumers this
super-directory service, and provide publishers walk-in traffic to their
site.

The metaserver is different from a web-crawler index in that the text
doesn't have to be pulled across the network, and that each Web site
maintains its independence. Crawlers will play a complementary role in @1,
as will services that provide human-generated analysis and opinion on Web
sites.

"It's going to take a combination of approaches and multiple alliances to
ensure that users can find what they are looking for in the new Web,"
noted PLS President Matthew Koll. "@1 is for everyone. We see it coming in
different flavors as multiple online partners impart their own slants - in
terms of database coverage, editorial judgment and commentary, and user
interface. We envision some users coming directly to us. But we also see
this as an opportunity to continue the behind-the-scenes support we have
been providing to publishers so effectively over the years. Our goal now
is to offer not just enabling technology, but technology that can bring in
new business to publishers."

@1 will be an open system. PLS plans to make the @1 APIs (Application
Programmer's Interfaces) public, so that all publishers and vendors can
participate. More details on @1 plans, including membership terms will be
forthcoming over the next few months.

About PLS

Personal Library Software is the leading supplier of text retrieval and
document management software combining intelligent retrieval techniques
with the flexibility of graphical user interfaces. The PLS search engine
is at the core of products or services from leaders in electronic
publishing, including Time Warner (www.pathfinder.com), Hewlett-Packard
(www.hp.com), the U.S. House of Representatives (www.house.gov),
Dialog/Knight-Ridder Information (www.dialog.com), the Associated Press,
DataTimes, Dow Jones, America Online, Prodigy, NewsNet, Telebase,
Congressional Quarterly, Grolier, Financial Times Information Services,
Appleton and Lange, and other important online and CD-ROM publishers. The
PLS family of products, first deployed in 1983, is used today by several
thousand organizations and several million individuals in CD-ROM and
multimedia publishing and online services, as well as in workgroup and
enterprise applications. Personal Library Software has emerged as the
leader in information retrieval, growing from "one of the best kept
secrets in full-text database management" into the "de facto standard".

Personal Library Software
(301) 990-1155
Internet: info@pls.com

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