BrightPlanet is currently commercially offering version 7 of its Harvest Engine .  Advanced harvesting in version 8 extends all aspects of discovering, expanding, organizing, configuring and managing sources and harvests.

Research and development efforts are underway for this next version coming soon:

• Expanded content sources – including proprietary sources and “pushed” content
• A Source Engine Manager module – mostly geared to site administrators, this capability exposes internal functions in bulk submits, management and configuration updates to entire suites of searchable databases
• Improved source configuration – this is a given and a constant in all BrightPlanet source efforts
• Expanded and more flexible filtering – our system already is state-of-art, but customers want and will get even more control over document acceptance and qualification
• Improved source discovery and selection – as we move into the realm of 100,000+ databases to manage and many more than that available for discovery, better mechanisms for source discovery and selection warrant research attention.  Importantly included in this emphasis is improved ways to ascertain and rank “authoritative” databases or harvest points
• Continued automation – BrightPlanet has the most automated system devised, and is committed to remain so.

Source engine and database configuration is a constant task as the Web grows and standards evolve.  Also, there are some entities determined to use the Web for aggressive or hostile actions or illegal activities.  Overcoming these approaches is a constant commitment by BrightPlanet and an active source of research and research interests for the company.