I used to run their dev servers (briefly back in 2001). I don't entirely understand what you mean by shady but the tech does work - and provided you use it for the right thing, extremely well. The key is to realise that it tries to be a semantic search, not a text search - if you want brute force grep you'll be better with a google search appliance or similar, I suspect.

The development team were well looked after and the CEO now is the same as then, so I'd hope the internal culture is still pretty pleasant - I really enjoyed working there and most of the employees genuinely believed in the product's ability to deliver (when not mis-sold, which, well ... seemed to happen reasonably rarely, which is about the best I've seen in any sales department). I only left due to discovering I really HATED living in Cambridge, which wasn't really something they could fix.

Ive used idol very extensively for approx 5 years. Its like combining oracle db with google search and then adding language analytics. Basically its a very advanced db (these were the first guys to really get nosql into the enterprise). You dont query the db, you search it. Keyview is also a nice addition to the IDOL stack.