OK, so I’ve been obsessed with search even before there was the Internet. I tried every indexing and file tracking program I could find from the long-departed Lotus Magellan to Zoom. Maybe because I wasn’t terribly organized, those early search products helped me find long lost email addresses and phone numbers. So I could hardly say no when Vivísimo CEO Raul Valdes-Perez invited me to join him for coffee at a Starbuck’s in Lower Manhattan.

Mr. Valdes-Perez, a native of Cuba, runs his seven-year-old startup from Pittsburgh, PA within sight of Carnegie-Mellon University, one of the premier centers of computer science research in the U.S. (yes, Virginia, there is such a thing outside of California).

His company is in the emerging field of enterprise search, which focuses on helping companies dig out nuggets of useful information from the steaming pile of corporate data every organization seems to accumulate.

Unless you’ve been hidden under that same steaming pile for the last few years, you know about desktop search programs like Google Desktop, Yahoo Search, Exalead and X1.com that chug through your PC to index everything and subsequently find the information you need in a flash.

Enterprise search extends that hunt beyond a single PC to the servers and data stores of your company or organization. But the concept has had a slow start. Mr. Valdes-Perez pointed out that while Americans launch some tens of millions of searches a day, company Intranets gets very little traffic. “The good stuff is just not on the Internet,” he says.

One of the challenges is complexity; while the bulk of online data is stored in Web standard HTML, corporate data can be in anything from Microsoft Exchange to Lotus Notes to a SQL database. Another is security: who gets access to what information can get tricky in a large organization. Companies like Vivísimo have been working to find, index and manage all that varied data.  He’s acquired an impressive list of customers so far, from federal agencies to manufacturer Tyco to Organon, now part of pharmaceutical giant Schering-Plough. After our meeting he was on the way to meet executives at Milbank Tweed who want to put thousands of cases into his search engine.

Mr. Valdes-Perez says his engineers have picked up useful ideas in some of today’s trends. Borrowing from social networking, they recently added a widget-like feature that lets one user annotate his search results for the next person. For example, a lawyer searching for a template for an employment contract might attach a note saying: “this one is biased toward the employer,” saving the next associate from having to analyze it all over again.

Interestingly, Mr. Valdes-Peres has built a company just shy of 100 people without any VC funding so far. He started out with a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation in 2000 and has managed to build his company organically. Now he says he’s looking to raise several million dollars to expand his reach – although the money may come from non-VC sources. With a mature company, the options are a lot broader for the entrepreneur.