$8 Million in New Funding for Revolutionary Web Site Search.

Business Editors

LITTLETON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 23, 2000

EasyAsk Accesses Product Catalogs, as well as Text, to find

Precise Information, Naturally

E-commerce sites hoping to provide better product searches for their customers will soon have a new ally, EasyAsk Inc. The Company has received $8 million in new funding, lead by Sigma Partners and OneLiberty Ventures, to fuel this month's introduction of the new EasyAsk product.

Early EasyAsk e-commerce customers, such as the B2B site www.safetyshoes.com, report that over 90% of searches successfully find relevant products, compared to the industry average of only 30%. "Not only do our customers benefit from EasyAsk's simpler and more effective search capabilities, but we also get specific information on what customers are looking for which helps us improve the site in real time." asserts Jim Codrea, CFO of Lehigh Valley Safety Shoe.

EasyAsk Inc. evolved from Linguistic Technology Corp. the leading provider of natural language access tools for corporate data warehouses. In November 1999, ComputerWorld named the company to its list of 100 "Emerging Companies 2000," and next month Gartner Group is featuring EasyAsk in the Emerging Technologies Pavilion at their Spring Symposium in San Diego.

EasyAsk running at the e-commerce site is unique in that it searches local database sources, such as e-commerce product catalogs, as well as documents published on the web. EasyAsk supports natural language searches and provides a fully customizable active dictionary that can be tailored to understand the specific terminology and information used at a particular web site. By understanding the search request and the available information, EasyAsk can generate sophisticated SQL or advanced text searches in order to extract precise information from the most relevant source.

John Mandile from Sigma Partners, will be joining EasyAsk's board. "We considered a number of search technologies before selecting EasyAsk," Mr. Mandile said. "None offered as complete a product that could leverage databases as well as text based information. We're very excited about this market and about EasyAsk's revolutionary approach to it."

Dr. Larry Harris, EasyAsk's founder and Chairman has delivered products that allow unsophisticated computer users to extract information from databases for over 20 years. According to Dr. Harris, "Applying our expertise to the Internet in general and to e-commerce in particular was a natural. After all, the viability of the Internet for e-commerce depends on people quickly and accurately finding the products and information they are looking for."

About EasyAsk

EasyAsk Inc. is a privately held, venture-funded company headquartered in Littleton, MA. More than 6,500 companies have acquired the Company's core technology. EasyAsk has implemented small, medium, and large-scale deployments including some with more than 10,000 licenses. Customers include e-commerce vendors, government agencies, major corporations and software developers. EasyAsk e-business application partners include IBM and INTERSHOP. Investors include Sigma Partners, OneLiberty Ventures and Venture Capital Fund of New England.