I wasn't trying to be coy, just trying to stay on topic (no pun intended).
The list is about robots, not search. I also don't want every message I
post to be about a plug for our products and technologies. I've been
hoping that someone independent (not one of the search vendors) would start
a list specifically about Internet search. Perhaps that should be one of
the first things that Mike Schwartz's new W3C working group does.
But since you asked... Topics are tree-like (actually graphs) sets of saved
queries, which can include one another, so they can be quite complex. We
have several customers who are developing systems that feed the documents
found by a robot into our engine with a Topic set that describes the
subjects they're looking for. Then you can perform searches on each topic
to categorize the information.
Or there's a real-time way to do it, with our Agent Server developer tools.
The Agent Server can manage a few hundred thousand profiles -- queries --
and compare them to a feed of several documents per second. The agents can
be set to take various actions -- put a link on a Web page, e-mail the
document, etc.
Nick