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Probably not, but odds are you've Googled.

Google Inc. has become synonymous with searching the Internet, and a planned initial public stock offering -- expected to value the company in the tens of billions -- is the toast of Wall Street.

At the same time Google's founding duo began their journey to fame and fortune as researchers at Stanford University, a group of Carnegie Mellon University computer scientists initiated their own project in the summer of 1998 to tackle the problem of information overload.

"The only way to address the problem is to let users see a lot more of what's out there, but with less effort," said Raul Valdes-Perez, 47, who led the CMU effort.

He and his two cofounders quickly built a business around the artificial intelligence and linguistics-infused algorithms they developed. Their venture makes it possible to sort the results of an ordinary Web search on the fly into contextual folders that allow the user to more quickly identify a set of Web pages akin to what they are looking for.

They called their venture Vivisimo, a Latin-derived word meaning vivacious. They say that's what the technology does -- enliven the Web searching process --- not by searching the Web itself, but rather by presenting the results of searches in a more organized manner.

It hadn't been that long since one of their CMU colleagues, Michael "Fuzzy" Mauldin, had phenomenal success building Lycos Inc., the first search engine company to trade on a public stock market. Lycos moved to Boston in 1999 before being acquired by a Spanish company and is now known as TerraLycos Inc.

Though its success has yet to match that of Lycos, or come anywhere near Google, Vivisimo is profitable and growing in its niche of licensing its software to organizations that require ways to efficiently navigate huge databases.

From its unassuming Squirrel Hill offices, the company has executed about 40 contracts with companies like Cisco Systems and organizations like the Journal of the American Medical Association. It also has garnered interest from a U.S. intelligence agency for counterterrorism applications.

One of its most recent efforts was to develop a software package for efficiently browsing content on Internet auction site eBay.

Soon after it started in business, the company put up a free demonstration Web site, http://www.vivisimo.com, where anybody can experience its clustered Web searches. By word of mouth, Vivisimo has become popular within a community of knowledgeable Web surfers. And it has been featured in articles in newspapers and online newsletters the world over.

For the past three years it has been recognized as one of the best search tools on the Web by SearchEngineWatch.com, an online search engine news site published by New York-based JupiterMedia.

Since September, Vivisimo has been able to turn clicks into cash through a partnership with Overture, Yahoo Inc.'s Web marketing unit and primary competitor to Google in the paid Web search ad placement sector.

Advertisers bid with Google and Overture to determine how much they are willing to pay every time someone clicks through to their Web sites following searches for certain keywords.

By partnering with Google or Overture, companies like Vivisimo can get a cut of that fee, which according to Chris Sherman, editor of the SearchDay search engine newsletter, is about 30 cents per click, with the partner -- in this case Vivisimo -- keeping about 60 to 70 percent.

Nate Elliot, an analyst for JupiterMedia, says the paid search ad placement market was $1.6 billion last year, and is expected to grow to $2.1 billion this year, with Google and Overture dominating. By 2008, it is expected to reach $4.3 billion.

While declining to provide revenue figures, Valdes-Perez said the Overture relationship now provides more than a quarter of Vivisimo's revenue.

The company's growth has been deliberate. It has raised a relatively minuscule $1.5 million in outside funding.

But now that search engine-related companies are hot, Valdes-Perez is beginning to entertain seeking serious venture capital funding.

Valdes-Perez bristles at a comment he received from a Silicon Valley-based venture capitalist that making it big as a technology company in Pittsburgh is virtually impossible due to a lack of business talent.

"We aim to show that not everything good comes from Silicon Valley," he said.

The company employs 15, including cofounder and chief scientist Jerome Pesenti, and cofounder and chief technical officer Chris Palmer. It is now hiring engineers and sales staff.

Chris Sherman, editor of SearchDay, the daily newsletter of SearchEngineWatch.com, said Vivisimo has a unique model of complementing, rather than competing with, the big-name search engines.

"They'll never have the sales or scope of somebody like Google or Yahoo, but I don't think they have to," he said. "They can be a good niche player. There's a real market there that's definitely going to grow."

"Google is very good at taking simple requests and finding (Web) pages that relate to those words," he said. "What it isn't good at is dealing with multiple interpretations or meanings for the same words. Vivisimo is clustering pages into relevant categories, which is something most of the major search engines aren't doing."

That is, except for search engines like Excite and Dogpile, that have licensed Vivisimo's software.

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