German Tax Evasion Bureau Selects Convera's RetrievalWare to Support Computer Forensics Initiatives.

Business Editors/Hi-Tech Writers

VIENNA, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 26, 2002

RetrievalWare Assists in Criminal Tax and Customs Fraud Investigations

By Pinpointing Evidence Stored Within Massive Volumes of Impounded

Data

Convera (Nasdaq:CNVR) today announced that the regional tax authority in Chemnitz, Germany is using Convera's RetrievalWare(R) search, retrieval and categorization software to assist in its ongoing criminal investigations.

Since May 2002, the Tax Evasion Bureau's investigative departments have been using RetrievalWare to support their computer forensics initiatives by scouring and pinpointing evidence of tax fraud contained in large volumes of impounded data.

Over 70 intelligence and law enforcement organizations in the United States and other countries currently use Convera's products for crime investigation and intelligence gathering and analysis.

Conducting knowledge-based searches through mushrooming volumes of data is a challenge faced by all authorities involved in criminal investigation. Tax employees at the fiscal authority in Chemnitz South are using RetrievalWare to support investigations of cases such as trade, industry, and capital investment tax fraud.

Impounded data, such as documents hidden or stored on computer hard drives, are being searched to locate proof of criminal conduct or clues that will help further their investigations.

The "wonder weapon", as the Tax Evasion Bureau describes Convera's RetrievalWare, has already proven its worth, quickly tracking down documents that were key to a number of critical cases and saving the authority a vast amount of time in its investigations.

The key factors in selecting RetrievalWare were its powerful pattern searching and semantic categorization capabilities, as well as the thorough services support provided by Convera.

RetrievalWare's pattern searching capability has proven helpful when tracking names of people or places as names can be spelled in a number of different ways; RetrievalWare enables users to find documents even if names are misspelled.

Should a search return no relevant results, investigators can rest assured that the information they are trying to locate does not actually exist within the database being searched. This feature - the ability to record no hits for certain search arguments and thereby to rule out certain individuals, places and so on - is especially important in the context of criminal investigation.

About Convera's RetrievalWare

RetrievalWare is a high-performance multimedia, cross- and multi-lingual search system that allows broad flexibility and scalability for implementation across corporate intranets and extranets.

RetrievalWare enables users to index and search a wide range of distributed information resources, including text, video, image and audio files, HTML, XML, over 200 proprietary document formats (such as word processors and publishing systems), relational database tables, document management systems, and groupware repositories.

Advanced search capabilities include concept and keyword searching, pattern searching, and query-by-example. RetrievalWare excels in distributed client/server environments with thousands of users, documents, images, and/or multiple media assets.

About Convera

Convera is a leading provider of mission-critical enterprise search, retrieval and categorization solutions. Convera's RetrievalWare(R) solutions maximize return on investment in vast stores of unstructured information by providing highly scalable, fast, accurate and secure search across more than 200 forms of text, video, image and audio information, in more than 45 languages.

More than 750 customers in over 29 countries rely on Convera's search solutions to power a broad range of mission-critical applications including enterprise portals, knowledge management, intelligence gathering, profiling, corporate policy compliance, regulatory compliance, customer service and more.

For more information, contact Convera at 800-788-7758, via e-mail at [e-mail] or on the Web at www.convera.com.

This release, including any statements from Convera personnel, contains statements about Convera's future expectations, performance, plans, and prospects, as well as assumptions about future events.

The reader is cautioned not to put undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, as these statements are subject to numerous factors and uncertainties, including without limitation, business and economic conditions and trends; continued success in technological advances; possible disruption in commercial activities caused by terrorist activity and armed conflict, such as changes in logistics and security arrangements; reduced customer demand relative to expectations; competitive factors; and other risk factors listed from time to time in the company's SEC reports.

Actual results may differ materially from our expectations as the result of these and other important factors relating to Convera's business and product development efforts, which are further described in Convera's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These filings can be obtained from the SEC's website located at www.sec.gov.

Any forward-looking statements are based on information available to Convera on the date of this release, and Convera assumes no obligation to update such statements.

The Convera design logo and the following are worldwide trademarks of Convera: Convera(TM), RetrievalWare(R), and Screening Room(R). The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.