Aptex categorizes more than 700,000 Web sites for Infoseek -- Web's largest directory.

SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 14, 1996--Aptex Software Inc., a leader in the application of artificial intelligence to Internet information analysis, Thursday announced that its Convectis text analysis server has categorized more than 700,000 Web pages -- an Internet first -- as part of the new generation of Infoseek Corp.'s Internet navigation service, which was announced Thursday.

Infoseek's new service now includes the Web's largest directory. Learning from initial human judgments and intermittent human feedback, Convectis acts as an "automated librarian" for Infoseek. Convectis intelligently reads and assigns Web pages to thousands of Infoseek categories.

"Infoseek's team of expert librarians uses Convectis to dynamically build and maintain its directory to offer the most current, comprehensive ontology of Web sites in the world," said Daniella Russo, vice president of product management at Infoseek.

"Convectis allows us to scale directly to the explosive growth of the Web, and helps us automate the overwhelming task of reading, understanding and making decisions about the content of millions of Web pages."

"Convectis catapulted Infoseek into first place as the largest Web directory," said Michael Thiemann, president and chief executive officer of Aptex Software Inc.

"We built Infoseek Guide in May this year with 350,000 Web sites. Since then the number of sites has doubled and the number of categories has tripled. Only a product like Convectis can keep up with the massive volume of information and explosive growth we're seeing on the Web."

The Internet explosion has made unlimited information available to anyone. However, many users are intimidated or annoyed by voluminous results they receive from many of the Internet's search services. Infoseek is the only navigation service that makes it easy to find information on the Internet by integrating search results with directory topics and related news and services.

Using Infoseek, users can type in queries using natural language without the need to learn complex syntax. Convectis helps build the directory by packaging high-volume, real-time document streams into custom categories.

Convectis is fast, objective, and consistent, accurately processing more than 150,000 documents per day in minimum configuration. Convectis uses patented neural network techniques and Content Vector technology to learn and correlate interactive and automated decision-making as well as for predictive modeling of future patterns, trends and behaviors.

Convectis integrates easily with Web servers, e-mail systems and newsfeeds. After reading documents, it returns an adjustable length summary, a list of key words and a list of categories that are relevant to the document.

Any combination of original and Convectis-generated information can be published online, dispatched to interested users, or stored in data warehouses. Convectis categories can also be used to select automated responses to customer e-mails and Web response forms.

Convectis intelligently assigns documents to multiple categories, improving user access and easing integration with existing categorization schemes. Convectis also eliminates the need for external knowledge bases. By learning word relationships directly from unstructured text, Convectis avoids the update and maintenance problems associated with databases, dictionaries, thesauri and complex queries.

With headquarters in San Diego, Aptex Software Inc. develops intelligent software solutions which "mine" content to enhance mission-critical business decisions and processes. Aptex uses proprietary neural network techniques to automate key document analysis processes and to predict trends and behavior based on learned document content.

Aptex Software Inc. is a subsidiary of HNC Software Inc. (NASDAQ:HNCS), a world leader in the application of neural network technology in client server environments serving the payment systems, financial services, insurance, retail, educational publishing, direct marketing market research markets.

For information about Aptex, contact the company's World Wide Web site at http://www.aptex.com or contact Jane Leonard, 9605 Scranton Rd, Suite 240, San Diego, Calif. 92121; Phone: [phone]; Fax: [phone]; email: [e-mail].

About Infoseek Corp.

Based in Santa Clara, Calif., Infoseek Corp. (NASDAQ:SEEK) provides a leading, free Internet navigation service. It remains one of the most frequently visited sites on the Internet because Infoseek's easy-to-use product allows new and experienced users to efficiently find the information they need on the World Wide Web, Usenet groups, company directories and from major news sources.

Infoseek's search technology has won numerous industry awards for its precise, relevant responses. Awards include "Number One Rated Search Engine" (PC Computing), "Best of the Test" (Internet World), "MVP Internet Tools" (PC Computing), "Top 100: Editors' Choice" (Home PC) and "Top Rated Search Engine" (Family PC). The company's World Wide Web site and award-winning Internet navigational services can be accessed at http://www.infoseek.com/.

CONTACT: Aptex Software Inc., San Diego

Jane Leonard, 619/646-0121