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SFGate uses Autonomy's Technology To Build The Most Comprehensive And Personalized Online Resource For Bay Area Residents

Autonomy To Automatically Organize and Link Information from Dozens of Sources, from the San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner to KRON-TV, Chronicle Books and the Associated Press

San Francisco, Calif. (February 17, 1999) - Autonomy, Inc. today announced that SFGate, a website operated by The Chronicle Publishing Company, will use Autonomy's Portal-In-A-Box™ software to automatically aggregate, categorize, hyperlink and personalize thousands of articles from the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner, Chronicle Books, the Associated Press, KRON-TV, and Bay*TV Cable Channel 35.

With Autonomy's technology, SFGate is poised to become the most comprehensive, personalized and easy-to-navigate site for Bay Area residents and visitors. Autonomy's technology will automate many of the labor intensive tasks associated with building information-rich websites, from categorizing thousands of articles from disparate sources by subject matter, to automatically inserting the relevant hypertext links. According to SFGate General Manager John Coate, Autonomy will help him add depth and breadth of information and make the site easier to navigate without requiring additional work from his staff. "Before we had Autonomy's technology, my editorial staff spent too much time tagging and linking content, which was a waste of their valuable time and talent. Now they can concentrate on creating and acquiring new content while Autonomy's technology automates the categorizing, tagging, and hypertext linking of our internal information and third-party content sources."

Because Autonomy's technology inserts hypertext links automatically at the time of retrieval, the links are always kept up to date and can even point the visitor to more recent information. "For example, a visitor reading a Bay Area Backroads travel feature from last month's episode on KRON-TV will automatically get a link to a brand new San Francisco Chronicle review of a nearby bed and breakfast," said Coate. In addition, site visitors will be able to easily navigate between local coverage of a particular story and worldwide coverage from the Associated Press. "I could have never offered this depth or breadth without Autonomy's technology, even if I'd been able to hire scores of staff dedicated solely to categorizing, tagging and inserting hypertext links," said Coate.

Over time, SFGate hopes to take advantage of the advanced personalization features made possible by Autonomy's Portal-In-A-Box™ For example, Autonomy's technology can monitor hundreds of websites to create personalized online newspapers tailored to the specific interests of each individual. Unlike similar systems, which require users to choose from a pre-selected set of topics, with Autonomy users can track any arbitrary subject they are interested in following. In addition, SFGate visitors would be able to request that they be alerted when articles of interest are first posted or when a subject they are interested in comes up in a chat room conversation.

Although SFGate is one of the first companies in the U.S. to use Autonomy's new Portal-In-A-Box™ software, the core technology has already been deployed by numerous new media publishers. News Corp.'s LineOne service, for example, uses Autonomy's technology to personalize its front page for each user as well as to sort and hyperlink more than 10,000 news stories a day, a task that would have required the work of more than 100 editorial assistants. In addition, LineOne users can set up special alerts to let them know when an article of interest is first posted, or when a particular topic is raised in a chat room. Autonomy's technology also helps LineOne advertisers target those consumers most likely to be interested in their products and services.

About Autonomy's Portal-in-a-Box™

Portal-In-A-Box™features everything that is required to automatically create and maintain an easy-to-navigate portal with well-organized information from hundreds of sources and advanced personalization features. Portal-In-A-Box™ is for anyone who wants to create a portal site, from online publishers creating vertical industry portals to intranet developers putting together corporate portals that offer employees the best of the Web and the company's intranet.

Autonomy's Portal-In-A-Box™is in the final stages of beta testing and scheduled to ship this spring. The product runs on Windows NT and most versions of Unix.

About Autonomy:

Autonomy (www.autonomy.com) develops software that automatically organizes large, unstructured volumes of information into personally relevant communications to help corporate intranets and commercial websites serve the changing needs and interests of users. Autonomy's products for knowledge management and new media publishing save time, labor and money by automatically and precisely categorizing, linking, personalizing and searching large volumes of information.

The intelligent pattern recognition technology that fuels Autonomy's software was originally developed by Autonomy's sister company, Neurodynamics, for use in intelligence and defense applications. That technology is at the heart of the British police force's Holmes2 system, named after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's legendary detective. The Holmes2 system helps the police solve crimes by matching fingerprints or by finding similarities and connections in disparate crime witness statements or police reports. The same technology is now being used to find connections in commercial data.

Autonomy was founded in 1996 and has offices in San Francisco, Boston, New York, Washington, D.C. and Cambridge, England. Autonomy customers include News Corp., MacMillan Publishing, Associated Press, Barclays Bank, Shell International, Semi-Tech, The Royal Mail and Unilever. On July 10, 1998, the company went public on the EASDAQ exchange. The company's current valuation is $220 million.

About SFGate:

Owned by the Chronicle Publishing Company, SFGate blends the content of a variety of sources, most importantly the San Francisco Chronicle and KRON-TV, with its own original content that is then closely linked with community conversation in conferences, chat sessions and other forms of online public dialogue. SFGate is the Bay Area's original and most popular community-based website, with tens of thousands of daily readers worldwide.

For further information, please contact:
Autonomy at (415) 243-9955 or visit the company's website at http://www.autonomy.com/

Press and analysts may contact:

Marivi Lerdo or Kris Marubio at Edelman Public Relations, ph: (415) 433-5381

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