Getting the Complete Picture With Attivio’s Active Dashboards, by Paula J. Hane, Newsbreaks (Oct 1)
Years ago (say the 1980s) the leading idea in designing executive information systems (EIS) was to identify critical success factors for the company and present daily a dashboard of indicators to senior management. Daily then - would have to be minute by minute today.
Paula Hane reports on an Active Dashboard developed by Attivio.
These are "designed to deliver consolidated insight from diverse sources and automate processes to help organizations discover and rapidly act upon critical information.". Active Dashboards are available for "Enterprise Information Integration, Enterprise Performance Management, Enterprise Relationship Management, Customer Interaction Management, and Social Brand Management."
That would be a demo to see.
Inside Search: Raymond Bentinck of Exalead, Part 1, and Part 2 by Stephen E Arnold (Feb 1 and 4)
Stephen Arnold had a long discussion with Raymond Bentinck of Exalead about search in the enterprise as being mission critical. It's not commodity.
Exalead has search systems it sells to the enterprise to replace legacy search systems from Verity (one example) and others.
Demos of its technology can be seen at the labs site, such Voxaleadnews for searching video and radio sources of news.
"This solution indexes radio and video news from around the world in several languages. In addition to this, we extract in real-time relevant entities from the news items such as people, organizations and locations."
Bentinck quoted Sue Feldman of IDC - "The next generation of information work will be search based.”
Exalead claims to be able to meet that requirement.
"Our platform is unique in having the same core platform that works on a single laptop for desktop search that scales to millions of users and billions of documents on, for example, our showcase Web search site, by new media companies to provide next generation search based applications, by organizations to provide internal and external search and in ever increasing numbers by organizations to allow them to build agile solutions to retrieve mission critical data from operational databases through to business intelligence, data Warehouses and master data management."
dtSearch Corp Announces New Product Line, eContent (Mar 13)
" dtSearch Corp., a supplier of enterprise and developer text retrieval software, announced extensions to its 64-bit developer product line. The new release covers both dtSearch's enterprise and developer products, including native 64-bit versions. "
Exalead meets Steve Arnold 12-11-2008
In this video, "Search engine expert Stephen E Arnold discusses the state of the search market, assesses Exalead's technology, and explains why he considers Exalead a company to watch."
One reason is the new search-inside a video called Voxalead that Exalead is demoing at its Lab.
There is some additional information in the blog entry - 5 questions to Stephen E. Arnold (Nov 19)
Five Steps in Selecting A Search Engine, by SUSAN E. ALDRICH of Patricia Seybold Group, eContent (Jan 21)
"The five steps I have identified for selecting a search engine will help you avoid undertaking a technology project that can’t be successful. Some of the steps can be strenuous for both you and your search vendors. Depending on obstacles in your organization, you might not manage to complete all the steps. But your selection process will be greatly enhanced by considering all—even if only completing some—of the steps."
Exalead Offers a Cloud(y)View of Information Access , by Paula Hane, Newsbreaks (Oct 2)
"... Exalead announced its official expansion into the North American market, a new corporate website (www.exalead.com) with a lot more information (case studies, white papers, etc.), and a new product line it is calling CloudView. The company says the CloudView family of products is an evolution of its exalead one:enterprise line, with a new architecture designed to better adapt to the scaling requirements of today’s enterprises and high-traffic, consumer-facing websites."
Google Upgrades and Rebrands Site Search Service Juan Carlos Perez, PC World (June 2)
New customized site search for businesses' public web site from Google.
"Formerly called Google Custom Search Business Edition, the service will now be called Google Site Search and offer a more comprehensive indexing capability and more granular options for ranking search results."
Of interest:
+ "more options to affect how search results are ranked and listed" - eg
"assign more weight to a document's age, so that recent pages are favored over older ones, something Google calls "date biasing." On the other hand, site owners also can "bias" search results towards pages from certain sections, like a product catalog."
+ "add a custom synonym dictionary, so that search results include not only documents containing the query's keywords, but their synonyms as well." - Hey - that's getting closer to a taxonomy.
For more detail, see Google lets admins control site search By Stephen Shankland, Webward (June 2)
An Interview with Exalead’s François Bourdoncle By Stephen E. Arnold, Altsearchengines (Apr 29)
Stephen Arnold studies technology related to search very closely. There couldn't be anyone better to interview François Bourdoncle, CEO of Exalead.
"I have been watching Exalead expand its product offering from a Web search system to a comprehensive, extensible enterprise solution, then to product innovations in the eDiscovery sector and social systems."
He asked very direct questions on the Altavista legacy for Exalead. M. Bourdoncle had worked on its development in the 1990s.
Exalead is one of very few (only one?) to straddle enterprise search and web search. M Bourdoncle -- "So now Exalead is definitely the fastest and most lightweight and scalable system on the market today. We’ve reduced the average footprint by a factor of 10 versus our closest competitor."
"When we say “search by serendipity,” we are talking about our particular form of assisted navigation. Some people also call this guided navigation or faceted search. The idea is that users can refine their searches and move around the information using both automatically extracted concepts and existing metadata or pre-built categories. This double-sided method is deployed in all of our products and customer implementations. Its universality is now very clear and it can be used in B2C [business to consumer] and B2B [business to business] implementations equally well."
Arnold’s New Study “Beyond Search” Now Available Beyond Search (Apr 15)
Stephen Arnold's new study - Beyond Search: What to Do When Your Enterprise Search System Doesn’t Work – is now available from the Gilbane Group.
Of interest: "Few people want to guess what magic sequence of key words unlocks the information in an enterprise search system. Users want to go "beyond search" with the system providing suggestions, delivering answers, and providing actionable information. Laundry lists just aren't what users want today.""
Beyond Search is Stephen Arnold's blog about online search and related topics. Arnold is the author of several indepth studies about enterprise search. This blog has three categories, cleverly linked from a sub-title line: database, enterprise, and interview
Pandia reviewed this in Beyond Search, a blog about search technology and the search engine industry (Mar 9, 2008)
Vivísimo Brings Social Search to the Enterprise, Newsbreaks (Oct 22)
"Vivísimo, Inc. (www.vivisimo.com) has introduced social search for the enterprise with the announcement of its new Vivísimo Velocity 6.0 enterprise search platform, which will be available within 45 days. Velocity 6.0 lets users save, share, and take action on search results to foster collaboration and new levels of communication within the organization."
Enterprise Search Practice Blog from Lynda Moulton at The Gilbane Group
Lynda Moulton writes about the evolution of search technology particularly as it is occuring in enterprise search but with assessment and monitoring of the larger web scene.
For example - Random Notes from the World on Search from July 13, 2007 - to get the thoughtfulnes of this blog.
"The fact that the New York Times has recently had at least one article a week relating to search technologies is really a business marker. While search was introduced to professional searchers 35 years ago, it has been a real sleeper for most of the decades since. Web technology is truly the enabler of so much that makes search work for the masses in so many environments. It’s pretty clear that although search is ubiquitous in the workplace, its commodity status and the normalizing of enterprise search protocols are still a few years off. It is going to be interesting to see who stumbles and who prevails of the current bumper crop of offerings. Or will another disruption take us into more innovative forms of search?"
KMWorld is running a web seminar on Using Social Search to Drive Innovation through Collaboration on October 16, 2007. Vivisimo and Gilbane Group are the presenters.
"Go beyond just finding information and discover how to increase collaboration, accelerate innovation, and gain insight into the collective intelligence of your organization."
Register at http://www.kmworld.com/Webinars/Details.aspx?EventID=248
IntelliSearch and Groxis Have Entered into a Strategic Partnership Enabling Discovery-Oriented Enterprise Search, PRNewswire via Marketwatch (Aug 24)
"IntelliSearch , Inc. announced today that it has entered into a partner agreement with Groxis, a leader in search visualization and discovery. The agreement entails an integrated product and service offering that extends the power of enterprise search. The combined IntelliSearch/Grokker solution helps customers get more value out of their search deployments."
The clustering and the visual display that Groxis provides should make this an interesting product.
'Mashups' Sew Data Together - Software Tools Can Cut Costs, Time for Linking Information Sources - By BEN WORTHEN, Wall Street Journal (Jul 31)
Companies are adopting the mashup approach and its tools to build new web-delivered information services.
"Mashups essentially are a way to take data trapped in separate software applications and combine them into new, hybrid applications. At most companies, data typically have been stored in silos -- customer information is in a customer-management system, for example, and information about order status is in an inventory-management system."
Jumbo sized e-newsletter from Enterprise Search for May . Especially note Best Practices In Enterprise Search (Vol. 3) and its excellent set of articles on Search 2.0, portal adoption, semantic search, geographic driven search, metadata, and more.
Search Grows Up with the Launch of Vivisimo Velocity 5.5 - New Version Addresses Critical Enterprise Search Issues of Scalability and Fault Tolerance, Business Wire (Feb 12)
Vivisimo is introducing the Velocity 5.5 enterprise search platform with much higher levels of scalability and improved search capabilities.
Two excerpts:
Scalability and data heterogeneity: ""As the amount of enterprise information grows by leaps and bounds, organizations storing terabytes of data clearly see the business value of expanding beyond departmental search applications," said Susan Feldman, vice president for search and digital marketplace technologies, IDC. "In an information-rich enterprise environment, search becomes the logical gateway to finding information across all data types and repositories. Because Velocity 5.5 addresses the need to scale, and searches across heterogeneous environments, it should be well received.""
Search functionality: "Velocity 5.5 also offers new search functionality to enhance the end-user experience. Velocity now handles such advanced queries as word proximity, complex date ranges, and natural language. In addition, Velocity 5.5 offers a tool for query expansion. For example, some names have many different spellings because they were transliterated into the Roman alphabet from other writing systems (Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, etc.). For these names, the ability to expand a query to include all spellings is critical. Velocity 5.5 offers the ability to suggest alternative queries for misspellings, word stemming, alternative translations and synonyms - all based upon administrator defined content."
All that - and clustering too.
Extending Exalead, KM World (Jan 31)
"Exalead has released Exalead one: enterprise , which has been designed to provide users with a unified access point to content and both structured and unstructured data regardless of format or location."
Also Exalead Announces Availability of exalead one:enterprise 4.5 -- New User Interface Offers Greater Choice, Simplicity and Ease-of-Use for Less Frustrating, More Satisfying Enterprise Search Experience, PRNewswire via Marketwatch (Jan 31)
Google eyes business market by Simon Avery, Globe and Mail (oct 13)
Google hasn't forgotten the corporate market and is forming partnerships to sell its Search Appliance.
"The company, based in Mountain View, Calif., announced its first re-seller partnership in Canada on Tuesday. Compugen Inc., an IT consultancy that integrates computer systems for companies, will begin offering its clients Google's search technology. The partnership follows several formed recently with IT specialists in the U.S."
It faces tough competition in this market - Autonomy Inc., Fast Search & Transfer ASA, and Endeca Technologies Inc., not to mention Microsoft.
Information Today, Inc. Launches Enterprise Search Portal, eContent (May 23)
"Information Today, Inc. (ITI) has announced the launch of a new portal covering enterprise search and related technologies. The site is to be launched in beta version on May 22 to coincide with the first day of the Enterprise Search Summit conference." Portal is at http://www.enterprisesearchcenter.com/
Inxight Launches Search Extender for Google, eContent (May 23)
Google Desktop users who are in organizations using the Google Search Appliance will soon see results filtered by person, company, place, or concept - a kind of clustering - through technology from Inxight.
"Inxight Software, a provider of enterprise software solutions for information discovery, has launched Inxight Search Extender for Google, an application that allows Google Search Appliance and Google Desktop users to find relevant documents and locate hidden information in document sets and individual documents."
Microsoft unveils new search tools for businesses, Reuters via Topix (May 16)
"Microsoft Corp. will unveil new tools on Wednesday that make it easier for office workers to share and locate information as the company seeks to fend off rivals such as Google Inc. in the enterprise software search market."
"Windows Live Search, which will be available for free from Microsoft's Web site, allows users to search for documents stored on their computers, on departmental computer networks or out on the Internet and see the results in one place."
New Google search tool will peer into proprietary relational databases, Scott M. Fulton, TG PUblishing (Apr 19)
"With what Google is now calling OneBox for Enterprise, owners of the Search Appliance tool - a server component many customers still don't know the company even produces for corporate customers - will be able to peer into relational databases, retrieving information from a Google query that customers up to now may have had to retrieve using a specially programmed SQL query."
The Business of Specialized Search. By Brian Livingston, Earthweb (March 7, 2006) -- What search tool should a small business use on its web site? Livingston looks as swickis (search wikis) used at Eurekster, and Rollyo for "roll your own". Article has examples.
Exalead Simplifies Enterprise-Wide Information Access with New Unified Search Software , PR Newswire via Marketwatch (Mar 6)
"... exalead one:enterprise(TM) 4.0. Built on the company's unified exalead one:search(TM) technology platform, the new version of Exalead's enterprise search software delivers tremendous performance improvements, greater flexibility and customization capabilities, as well as new semantic technologies to improve multi-lingual search results."
Workgroup search, KMWorld (Feb 15)
Exalead has announced a new enterprise search product for small businesses - exalead one:workgroup 4.0.
"The new solution is built on the company's unified technology platform--exalead one:search--and offers users a way to access unstructured information no matter where it resides."
Exalead also updated its desktop search software, exalead one:desktop Professional Edition.
Groxis Releases Web2.0 Application for Enterprise Search Management
- "GrokkerESM Integrates Content Federation, Powerful Text Mining, and Visual Search Capabilities for the Enterprise ", PR Newswire via Marketwatch (Nov 16)
"GrokkerESM provides businesses, libraries and content providers with a powerful combination of federated content access and topically organized visual search results for any type of information found online."
Would seem from this press release that Grokker, a "visual" search engine that displays results clustered in orbs, is having some success in providing "federated access" to various databases including IEEE and EBSCO
"Sun Microsystems partnered with Groxis in 2004 and then licensed an advanced version of GrokkerESM, called SunLibrary Grokker, which provides federated access and visually organized search results for several different research sources including the IEEE Electronic Library, the EBSCOHost journals database and Sun's own internal email research repository."
Web search gets down to business by Cathleen Moore, InfoWorld (Oct 31)
"... several enterprise search vendors are directing their technology toward Web search, offering ways to categorize Web data for specific markets and tie these fine-tuned Web results together with intranet and desktop search findings."
Convera targets search to vertical industries such as media, financial services, research, and legal. Its private label search engine Excalibur will organize content "facets" (topics and sub-topics) drawing on Excalibur's 4.5 million categories.
Exalead is also mentioned for providing an "integrated search experience" to enterprises. It has 4 billion index and 2 million categories.
Also Convera Positioned to Launch Web Service PR Newswire (Oct 31)
The Excalibur index has 4 million pages, 500 million images, 5 million video, and 20 million audio.
The French connection, KM World (Nov 1) Exalead launches enterprise search in the US and a desktop seach product. "The platform serves as the foundation for Exalead’s suite of search products designed for desktop, enterprise and the Web. The company has also released exalead one:desktop professional edition, the first software solution from the exalead one:search family of products."
IBM, Google Team on Search "Two giants are integrating their enterprise search technologies." Red Herring (Oct 28)
IBM and Google will be "integrating their enterprise search technologies for office computers so employees can better search for information in documents, personal e-mail as well as large databases. "
"Specifying and Implementing Enterprise Search" By Martin White in Freepint (Sept 29) Article is an introduction to article to an in-depth report published
by FreePint: "Enterprise Search Guidebook".
"The overall awareness of search by many managers has been limited to the experience of using Google, and other web search engines, and there seems to be little understanding of the differences between web search and intranet/enterprise search. This situation may improve now that desktop searching is rapidly increasing in performance."
Lists 10 critical success factors and names 10 web resources.
Book is reviewed in the October 13th issue - "Enterprise Search Guidebook"
reviewed by Helen Day
Heightened awareness in KMWorld (Aug 24) - New capabilities for federated search and alerts in Inxight's SmartDiscovery Awareness Server 5.2 - "designed to derive insight and intelligence from hundreds of high-value information sources through a single interface".
Of interest: "alert module in SmartDiscovery Awareness Server includes the ability to set up e-mail and landing page alerts based on changes to a specific document or Web page or the appearance of newly available information of interest in deep Web, Internet, news, internal systems or other sources. Results can be shared with others via e-mail, or formatted for printing and reading offline."
Inxight has a flash presentation on SmartDiscovery and an archived web seminar on the Power of Federated Search and Alerts.
Endeca Announces New Search and Analysis Solutions EContent (Aug 12)
"Endeca, a provider of Guided Navigation, Search, and Analysis solutions, has announced the availability of new Government Search and Analysis Solutions. Built on Endeca's search and Guided Navigation platform, the solutions are designed to help government agencies deploy retrieval capabilities for public-facing Web sites and internal information management applications."
In Search of Intelligent Search by Michael P. Voelker, Intelligent Enterprise (Aug)
"Frustrated searchers, take heart: Consolidation is the trend in search, and it's beginning to help organizations achieve cohesive information intelligence. This trend is illustrated by two main developments. First, the data query and content search worlds are converging to give businesses a single point of access to structured, semi-structured and unstructured information. And second, organizations are attempting to resolve the "search-engine glut" problem either by consolidating results through federated access to existing search applications or by providing a single search solution across the enterprise."
Endeca and Oculus Partner To Bring Power of High-Value Visualization to Endeca Latitude Business Wire via Marketwatch (July 11)
"Endeca and Oculus Info Inc., today announced a new technology partnership to bolster Endeca's search, navigation and analysis products with Oculus' next-generation information visualization capabilities. Starting with Endeca Latitude, Endeca's revolutionary, new information access and analysis solution, Oculus will provide unique, high-value information visualization to help users quickly analyze and drill into customer, market, sales and other aggregate and transactional data."
"Oculus' visualization capabilities allow large amounts of complex information to be conveyed in an intuitive, easy to understand, easy to use manner. Rather than getting lost in successive levels of drill-down, visualization helps reveal areas of sparse data and dense data, thereby assisting users find pertinent information. Visualizations built by Oculus will leverage Endeca Latitude's unique capabilities, including Guided Navigation and direct transaction-level data access - and will offer new ways to expose and help find anomalies and patterns of interest."
Verity To Make Search Software Free For A Year By Thomas Claburn, TechWeb (Jun 15) "...Verity Inc., an enterprise search and analytics software company, will by the end of the week extend the free trial period for its Verity Ultraseek application from 30 days to one year ..."
Verity has made other changes too. It bought 80-20 Software Pty Ltd., a privately held Australian software company, to add a desktop search component.
"Enterprise customers want simple search options that make all information accessible, says Sue Feldman, VP at research firm IDC. "In order for search to be successful, you have to create a single point of access to all the information in the enterprise, both data and content," she says."
Enterprise Search - Seek And Ye Shall (Hopefully) Find By John Edwards, CIO (June 15) Growing volumes of unstructured text in companies has boosted interest in effective search technologies. Keyword searching gives occurrences but no context. Search technologies that show related topics are in demand.
"Welcome to the new world of search technology, where results are measured not only in terms of information depth, but also by real-world relevance. "We now have the power to build a topic structure, including topics, subtopics and browsable subcategories," says Eileen Quam, information architect for the Minnesota Office of Technology in St. Paul. "People can walk their way through our information."" See this search for metadata at the Minnesota Office of Technology.
Enterprise search may demand a range of solutions and types of tools. An analyst at Forrester (Ramos), sees enterprise search merging into Enterprise Content Management or Business Intelligence. Why not both? ""Its role in ECM is to help organize and retrieve the content under management," observes Ramos. "In BI, it is the logical equivalent to data mining for text." Ramos feels that "search vendors must pick a path and strike the right deals or partnerships to move forward." "
Of interest: "Approximately 85% of Canadian Internet users conduct at least one search using the top engines each month, compared with 73% in the United States. SOURCE: COMSCORE NETWORKS"
Going where no search engine has gone before - Connotate Technologies uses information agents to extract data from Deep Web BY Dibya Sarkar, FCW.com (May 31)
Connotate Technologies in New Jersey says it can mine and extract data from the Deep Web. "Through the use of intelligence-based software modules called information agents, corporate and government organizations can quickly and easily target specific unstructured data from intranets and password-protected Web sites on a continual basis." Pricing starts at $100,000 US.
Heart Of The Search By Thomas Claburn and Tony Kontzer, Information Week via Internet Week (May 23) - about Google's products for use in businesses.
"The latest addition came last week: Google Desktop Search for Enterprise, software that sits on PCs and comes with security, configuration, and deployment controls that IT administrators can centrally manage. In addition to searching documents and other files on a computer, it can comb through IBM Lotus Notes databases and messages in Microsoft E-mail clients. If linked with a Google appliance, it can simplify search by offering a single interface to do queries of a PC, intranets, and the Web."
More is expected, especially -- "Sue Feldman, VP of content technologies at research firm IDC, expects Google eventually to offer the ability to categorize information, browse files, and hard-wire certain documents to be returned for specific queries."
Metadata: A Promising Solution by Elizabeth Liddy, Educause (May/June 2005)
Conclusion: "Metadata offers a promising solution to institutional needs for providing improved access to important information contained in a wide range of documents. However, manual metadata assignment, like cataloging, is a labor-intensive and costly function, requiring special knowledge and training. With the ever-increasing quantity of materials requiring such attention, the need for efficient metadata assignment is all the more keenly felt. Interestingly, the resulting tension between “efficient” metadata assignment and “quality” metadata assignment6 may in fact be artificial, given the preliminary evidence that high-quality metadata can be automatically assigned quite efficiently, even if a human reviewer is included in the loop"
Google launches Desktop Search for business users , CoolTech Zone (May 19) - some details on Google's tools for the enterprise. The business desktop will have " central control of user features and preferences, the ability to encrypt user data, searching index files and easy deployment on local Intranet within the company’s infrastructure.
Inxight Acquires Federated Search and Alert Technology Assets From Intelliseek PR Newswire via Marketwatch [subscription] (May 17) - Inxight announced at the Enterprise Search Summit that it "has completed its purchase of the federated search and alert technology product line, formerly called Enterprise Discovery Suite, from Intelliseek, Inc. The product line has been renamed Inxight SmartDiscovery(R) Awareness Server." Press release describes the features.
What will Intelliseek do now? Intelliseek Sells Enterprise Discovery Suite Product Line to Inxight PR Newswire via CBS Marketwatch -- "Intelliseek Inc.'s award-winning Enterprise Discovery Suite product line has been acquired by Inxight of Sunnyvale, Calif., in a move that allows Intelliseek to focus its efforts on marketing intelligence and buzz measurement for major corporate clients and brands."
They are going to concentrate on market intelligence and build on the success of Blogpulse. "Intelliseek's goal is to be the undisputed leader in measuring and analyzing what we refer to as 'consumer-generated media (CGM),'" said Intelliseek CEO Mike Nazzaro."
I Column Like I CM:Metadata--Think outside the docs! by Bob Doyle, eContent (May 3)
Post-coordinate searching is punching keywords in and hoping the search engine matches on the right documents. Pre-coordinate searching is using indexing and classifying tools to find documents that are about your words. Post-coordinate is much less expensive. Should companies invest in pre-coordinate indexing by adding metadata and developing taxonomies?
"Metadata lets intelligent computer programs find the meaning of your content, beyond that discoverable by examining the documents themselves. Librarians called it the machine-readable catalog (MARC). Tim Berners-Lee calls it the Semantic Web. The question being asked by the financial types is when will commonly available Web tools exploit that extra meaning to deliver better information to your audience?"
Author recommends adding metadata but has some provisos.
Presentations from the Information Highways Conference 2005 held in Toronto April 6 and 7 are online at http://www.econtentinstitute.org/conference/program.asp. These are directed to econtent processes and systems for organizations: knowledge management, content management, imaging, taxonomies, electronic records, intranets, wireless and mobile.
Enterprise Search: A Different Animal By Susan Kuchinskas. Internet.com (OCt 27) Brief report about the vendors at the KM World & Intranets trade show. "Enterprise search is different from consumer Web search in two ways, he [Matthew Glotzbach, business product manager for Google Search Appliance], said: First, most information is not stored as Web pages on Web servers. Second, there's a different standard of relevance."
Copernic Finds a "Seam" in Enterprise Search Traffick.com (Oct 25) -- Copernic has spun off a new company - Coveo - to market the COpernic search to enterprises. Coveo has a desktop product -- "Coveo's desktop product is "designed to integrate with our enterprise search." This, of course, means an "interruption-free experience" in the process of scouring corporate intranets for documents."
Smart Search by Joab Jackson. Government Computer News (Aug 23) US Government agencies are turning to new search systems that provide federated search to be able to search across many specialty repositories rather than run separate queries.
US Center for Drug Evaluation and Research is using RetrievalWare software from Convera.
Nuclear REgulatory Commission has taken the Autonomy software suite - Intelligent Data Operating Layer Server - for its portal and search features.
Google has two white papers on the importance of search to the enterprise. Both are links from Google's page about its Search Applicance.
Look for:
Enterprise Search -- Simplictiy and Enterprise Search: A New Model for Managing Your Enterprise Information. Google 2400
Search and the Strategic Value to the Enterprise -- by Dave Girourd, General Manager, Enterprise, Google Inc. Published in eContent Magazine.
Copernic Launches Enterprise Search 3.0 EContent (June 22) Small to medium businesses can search online documents with the latest version of Copernic's Enterprise Search.
FAST Launches Market Intelligence Application by Paula J. Hane NewsBreaks (June 21) FAST "has now announced FAST Marketrac, an enterprise software solution that gathers, analyzes, and communicates critical market intelligence from multiple, disparate sources throughout an enterprise and the Web."
Report: 25% of Critical Data is Flawed By Sharon Gaudin Internet News (May 19) "Many major companies are making crucial business decisions based on flawed data, according to a new study from Gartner Inc."
Seek but you won't always find By Adam Turner. The Age (June 8) - reports on Jakob Nielsen's comments about searching at the recent Web Usability 2004 conferences in Melbourne and Sydney.
"One in three attempts to find information online fails, and poor search results within websites are the primary culprit, says Jakob Nielsen, user experience expert and co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group."
I Column Like I CM: Facets in your Future by Bob Doyle of CMS Labs in Cambridge, MA eContent (June 8) Recommends a faceted directory to help users find documents. There is more about content management and the use of facets at http://www.cmsreview.com/
Google updates enterprise search appliance By Evan Hansen CNET News.com (June 1, 2004) Google upgraded its enterprise search product - referred to as an "appliance". "The new system is bigger, with more processing power and memory, allowing a single box to index up to 1.5 million documents and 300 queries per minute, fivefold increases over the earlier model, he said. The boxes cost between $32,000 and $175,000 each, depending on the configuration. "
Copernic Achieves Enterprise Search Milestone; 1500 Deployments of Enterprise Search Product Attained In Less Than Six Months Business Wire via CBS Marketwatch (June 1) In addition to being the search engine for small to medium sized businesses, Copernic has an agreement with Infospace to provide site search through InfoSpace's network of search distribution partners.
IBM expands search push with Masala By Michael Kanellos. CNET News.com
(April 23, 2004, 4:00 ) -- IBM is doing more in the field of information retrieval with the launch of Masala. This is "a new version of its DB2 Information Integrator software that will let corporate employees retrieve information from databases, applications and the Web at the same time. Subsequent improvements will include a data-mining component code-named Criollo. " Natural language searching will be possible.
The EnterpriseSearchCenter is a show piece from Information Today Inc that demonstrates what enterprise search engines can do. The vendors are Entopia, Northern Light and Synomia and they have crawled the Information Today sites -- Information Today, Inc., eContent Magazine, KMWorld, Destination CRM, eMedia Live, Streaming Media, Cyberskeptic's Guide, and Intranets.
MetaCarta maps search results. EContentInstitute (March 29) - Boston firm, MetaCarta, has developed Geographic Text Search that will do a text search on geographic terms and display them on a map. Demo is available at MetaCarta by request. Intended for firms and government offices who need to search their documents in a geographic context.
Inxight SmartDiscovery 4 Provides Powerful New Capabilities Enabling Customers to Discover the True Value of Information Press Release (Feb 10)
"New Version Features Fact Extraction to Automatically Identify Events and Relationships in Text, and More Powerful Search, Entity Extraction and Taxonomy Capabilities "
Of interest -- ""Search is no longer enough," said Susan Feldman, IDC's vice president of content technologies. "Enterprises will never be able to understand the knowledge that they have at their fingertips unless they add new tools to their information workbench. Finding patterns over time and over collections of documents requires the kind of text mining capabilities that Inxight offers. These tools can prevent information disasters from happening." "
Moreover Releases Intranet v. Internet Research EContent (Feb 10) - Here's a shocking bit -- "Moreover Technologies has released research into knowledge worker's information consumption that indicates how Intranets have thus far failed to make significant in-roads into the public Internet's dominance as the primary information resource for many knowledge workers. " Only 10.9% saw the Intranet as the primary source of information.