Maybe it's appropriate that Groxis, which sells the ``Grokker'' search tool, has moved its headquarters to spiffy new digs in the San Francisco financial district, just across from the Bubble Lounge.

The Bubble Lounge was all the rage during yes, the Bubble period. And while we're hardly calling Groxis a bubble company, it is indeed an Internet play. That's a business model in favor again -- just look at the other wiki, blogger and social networking Web 2.0 start-ups that are all the rage. Indeed, Groxis has not only moved from staid offices on a Sausalito wharf, it has also snagged $12 million from a number of venture investors led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

It's also appropriate that some Bubble language returns too. Grokker, of course, is an offshoot of ``grok,'' first used by Robert Heinlein in his science fiction novel ``Stranger in a Strange Land.'' A Martian word meaning literally ``to drink'' and metaphorically ``to be one with,'' grok was picked up during the boom years, and used to mean something akin to ``understand, through intimate and exhaustive knowledge.''

Spherical search

It follows that Groxis' tool, Grokker, differentiates itself from mainstream search players Google, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves by helping users to dig deeper in their searches. Grokker relies on search engines to do the crawling, but lists the results differently: according to subject, so that a search for Paris gives you a single page with several categories titled ``history,'' `museums,'' ``universities,'' ``hotels'' and so on.

The results are presented on the Web page in the shape of a sphere, and the user drills down within multiple layers of the sphere to search for exactly what they are looking for.

Of course, in this post-Bubble era, the trick for Groxis is to get users to pay for the service, especially since its format makes it less friendly to advertising. It says it has already signed up paying users in the six figures.

Groxis also aims to sell to schools and universities, where students could make use of Grokker's technology. (We wish them luck, given the current state of the nation's school budgets. Still, the company says the Manatee school district in Maine bought 2200 licenses to put on Apple iBooks for students.)

Companies targeted

Finally, Groxis is selling its product to companies, which might like Groxis' ability to integrate an Intranet search with Web search and more (Groxis can also include search results from Lexis Nexis, IEEE, Web Library and so on, if a user has an account with such services).

The company says it has picked up more than 100 such customers, including Dell, Microsoft, U.S. Navy, CIA and Visa, though it hopes to announce some bigger deals later this year, when schools finalize purchasing plans. Groxis is sticking with its original plans -- announced last year -- to charge individuals $49 to download the software for more than the free 30-day test period.

Meanwhile, Chief Executive RJ Pitman hopes to pull in enough revenue that he's breaking even by the end of the year. And for next year, he's aiming for four-fold revenue growth. It's going to be hard slogging, but Pitman picked a good spot to blow off steam come nightfall: The Bubble Lounge is just across the street.