ConveraCrawler is an experimental web crawler under development since April 2004.

ConveraCrawler is owned and operated by Convera Corporation as part of an effort to develop a state-of-the-art searchable Web index. The information gathered by ConveraCrawler is indexed and will be made accessible via one or more publicly-accessible web sites in the near future.

From Convera Site:

"We intend for ConveraCrawler to be a polite and unobtrusive netizen. From January 2005 through March 2005 we will be rapidly increasing the size of our Web index towards an initial target of 4 billion pages. As a result, during this period we may occasionally make page requests at a rate exceeding commonly accepted standards for unobtrusive crawling. We apologize for this intrusion and will return to a more discreet crawl rate at the earliest possible date."

And this is how the Convera Internet Spider was described in a report released in 2001:

"Convera Internet Spider is a multimedia, high-performance web spider/crawler for augmenting the retrieval
capabilities of Convera RetrievalWare®, for stand-alone use, or for integration with other applications. In
addition to HTML-based web pages, Convera Internet Spider also retrieves word processing, PDF and
multimedia assets including audio, video and images. It is highly configurable and multi-threaded and can
provide deep, broad and repetitive crawling. Users who want immediate notification when items of interest
arrive can post Agent Profiles to pull links to related documents to their desktops. Components can be
deployed on multiple machines for optimum performance and bandwidth."

Convera technology (crawler) is used in many domains such as retreiving and finding informations for Defense Technical Information Center or Department of Defense ("Convera's RetrievalWare will be integrated into the VIMS Web-based ecommerce portal to enable users to search for and retrieve visual information from multimedia archives expected to grow substantially in size. Within the Department of Defense, there are approximately 700 databases that process and manage multimedia assets that RetrievalWare search can be made available to in follow on projects" - see full article).

For the moment the crawler technology is mainly used for "providing an integrated results page derived from both intranet and Internet content".