Deep Web Technologies introduced Search Builder, an automatic deep web search-engine creation tool. This tool enables Deep Web Technologies’ clients to personalize the federated search experience for particular individuals, departments, classrooms or other groups that require different default collections and/or a modified user experience when conducting deep web searches. In short, Search Builder makes it possible to deliver any number of individualized federated search portals within an organization. Search Builder allows administrators or authorized users to create as many federated search portals as needed, which represent privately branded search pages containing different default collections and search fields used for the search, as well as customized user experience. Future plans include integrating Search Builder into Deep Web Technologies’ free media sites, Mednar (http://www.mednar.com/), Biznar (http://www.biznar.com/), and ScienceResearch.com (http://www.scienceresearch.com/). http://www.deepwebtech.com/
Category: Enterprise search & search technology (Page 28 of 61)
Research, analysis, and news about enterprise search and search markets, technologies, practices, and strategies, such as semantic search, intranet collaboration and workplace, ecommerce and other applications.
Before we consolidated our blogs, industry veteran Lynda Moulton authored our popular enterprise search blog. This category includes all her posts and other enterprise search news and analysis. Lynda’s loyal readers can find all of Lynda’s posts collected here.
For older, long form reports, papers, and research on these topics see our Resources page.
Earlier comments in this blog referred to Autonomy ads in Information Week. They have continued throughout early 2009 with just the latest proclaiming “Autonomy Dominates Enterprise Search” in bold red and black, two of my favorite, eye-catching colors. Having read the publication for over ten years, I notice things that are different. Seeing a search company repeatedly showing up keeps me noticing because they are the first to spend on major advertising like this in an IT publication.
This week the predictable happened, it was an article by Information Week‘s Sr. VP focusing on Autonomy’s terrific business run in a tough economy. Fair enough – it happens all the time for big spenders.
I just want to remind readers that if you are a small unit in a large organization or a small or medium business, there are dozens of enterprise search solutions that will serve you extremely well, with much lower cost of ownership and startup effort than Autonomy. You do not need the biggest or fastest growing company’s products to get good or even excellent solutions. Furthermore, the chances of getting superior customer support and services from a more modest company, which is focused exclusively on search excellence, are much better.
Be sure to check out the offerings at the Gilbane Conference in San Francisco next week. A lot more guidance and good case studies will give you an earful of what else to consider. The search headliners at the conference with Hadley Reynolds moderating are:
E8. Search Survival Guide: Delivering Great Results
Speakers: Randy Woods, Co-founder & Executive VP, non-linear creations, Best Practices for Tuning Enterprise Search and Miles Kehoe, President, New Idea Engineering
E9/I5. The Next Big Thing: Tomorrow’s Search Revealed
Speakers: Stephen Arnold, ArnoldIT, What You Need to Know About Google Dataspaces and Jeff Fried, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft
E10/I6. Bringing it All Together: Perils and Pitfalls of Search Federation
Speakers: Helen Mitchell Curtis, Senior Program Director of Enterprise Solutions, MacFadden, Federated Search in a Disparate Environment, Larry Donahue, Chief Operating Officer & Corporate Counsel, Deep Web Technologies, Federated Search: True Enterprise Search and Jeff Fried, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft
E11/I7. The Special Case of Categories – and Where To Find Them
Speakers: Joseph Busch, Founder, Taxonomy Strategies, Taxonomy Validation, and Arje Cahn, CTO, Hippo, Find What You Need in Unstructured Content with the Help of Others (and your CMS): Demo of Wikipedia with Faceted Search
E12/I8. It’s Easier with Structure: Leveraging Markup for Better Search
Speakers: Dianne Burley, Industry Specialist, Nstein Technologies, Semantic Search and J. Brooke Aker, CEO, Expert System, A 3-Step Walk Through ECM Using Semantics
E13/I9. Improving SharePoint Search & Navigation with a Taxonomy and Metadata
Looking forward to seeing many of you next week at Gilbane San Francisco. Whether you will be there or not, you can suggest questions to ask our analyst panel. Each of the panelists have specific areas of expertise covering web content management, web governance, enterprise social software and social media, collaboration, and enterprise search. The panel is a keynote session after the two keynote presentations from Microsoft and Adobe, so we’ll also be covering reactions to those. You can submit your questions directly to me via a comment, email, or twitter (DM or post using the hashtag #gilbanesf).
Registration for the conference is still open and will be available on-site. If you register in advance you can still get a $200. discount using GILBANE as the discount code. There is no charge for the keynotes or the technology demonstrations or product labs.
K2. Keynote Analyst Panel
We invite industry analysts from many different firms to speak at all our events to make sure our conference attendees hear differing opinions from a wide variety of expert sources. A second, third, fourth or fifth opinion will ensure you don’t make ill-informed decisions about critical content and information technologies or strategies. This session will be a lively, interactive debate guaranteed to be both informative and fun.
Moderator: Frank Gilbane
Panelists:
Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst, Social Computing, Forrester
Hadley Reynolds, Research Director, Search & Digital Marketplace Technologies, IDC
Larry Hawes, Lead Analyst, Collaboration and Enterprise Social Software, Gilbane Group
Lisa Welchman, Founding Partner, WelchmanPierpoint
Here is a monthly summary of some interesting and important announcements for April, but first a couple of comments on the Infonortics Search Engines conference in Boston the last week of April. Ever searching for ways to embrace and make social tools more useful, I decided to tweet the entire Infonortics meeting. Except for a lapse late on Monday because I left a little early and some wireless issues Tuesday PM, I was able to pass on quite a few interesting or relevant comments by speakers. See what you get out of some very terse tweets by searching in Twitter infonorticssearchengine (that takes up entirely too much space I learned). The talks were excellent and many of the speakers emphasized how hard it is to do search well; it was also clear that there are many, many ways to try to do it well, none of them for the faint of heart. If you want to get under the search hood, this is the conference for technologists and those who want to hear what the development community is pondering.
Here is the April news:
Marketwire. Bell Mobility and Coveo Partner to create Enterprise Search from Bell, an Exclusive Enterprise-Grade Mobile Search Solution, March 31, 2009.
My diminished manual dexterity and old eyes have discouraged me from embracing smart mobile devices but this announcement demonstrates that Coveo does understand the future of search. Coveo is releasing many enhanced functions and new options but the emphasis on search on a handheld is compelling for all road warriors. From what I understand, setup is pretty quick and productivity is immediate. This is a smart move to support Coveo’s current customer base and a draw for new ones.
Velten, Carlo. Official Qitera Blog: Qitera Enterprise – Search as a Service, April 2, 2009
There is a 15-day free trial being offered for this new software as a service for aggregating and sharing Internet search results with colleagues within the enterprise. As a consultant in knowledge management, helping people with collaboration and sharing technologies for KM processes, I find this an intriguing option. If any readers have checked it out, please let us know your impressions. http://www.qitera.com/corp/products/overview
Knovel Enhances Engineering Reference Offering, Adding Works from Five New Publishers, 04/06/2009
As a former technical librarian in a Fortune 500 chemical company, I contributed to a massive manually built index to technical information to support our research scientists. We ensured that all property data for any materials we developed, or developed by our competitors was indexed for rapid retrieval (e.g. what is the thermal conductivity of ABC grade of graphite). The overhead for scanning journals, government documents, patents and conference papers to harvest and categorize that information was enormous. Since I learned about Knovel in 2002, I have been a huge fan of the value of the content they codify and make accessible through their proprietary retrieval tools. This content is re-purposed through licenses with publishers who understand the increased value of being able to manipulate tables, charts and graphs as well has being able to compare data from various sources of reference books. Engineers and scientists need to be able to find data expressed in the most relevant form for their purpose. Knovel provides an aggregating and retrieval engine, and researchers can then normalize search results dynamically themselves through simple re-sorting operations. If you want to be kept abreast of the wealth of content that continues to come on-line from Knovel, be sure to visit their site and sign up for announcements. I recommend a subscription to their services to every scientific and engineering library in my client organizations.
Endeca Technologies, Inc. … today announced a formalized partnership to deliver Endeca’s Digital Asset Navigator solution on Open Text Digital Media Group’s Enterprise Media Management Solution.
April 16, 2009. Endeca’s Digital Asset Navigator offers an unprecedented access and discovery experience, combining Endeca’s market leading search, Guided Navigation and Content Spotlighting capabilities. It integrates related data from Open Text’s enterprise Digital Asset Management solution, as well as databases, file servers, enterprise applications and other source systems… The joint solution also takes advantage of Endeca’s advanced security capabilities to ensure that users only have access to data they are approved to see and use…
This is an interesting alliance, to be sure. Digital asset management is an arena ripe for growth and it has not gotten the wide-spread traction I believe it deserves. For publishers and R & D operations the productivity gains can be huge and this combined offering may intensify focus on an under-leveraged technology by ensuing high security and excellent retrieval. Looking at the headline, I would just advise that they pare down the labeling to something pithy and memorable.
X1 is gaining some serious traction and I know it appeals to engineers who like to maintain good order with their piles of data, particularly the flow of large quantities that show up in email and feeds. I spent a few hours four years ago with an engineer, an X1 devotee, who had tagged his email in text files scrupulously and then used X1 to index them every night. He swore by its value and reliability. This looks like they recognize the service they provide to customers who live in email and need to master their desktop domain. Theirs is a niche with a large audience to capture.
ISYS Search Software Announces Release of ISYS:sdk 9. April 28, 2009. Newest Version of Company’s Integration Kit Offers Dramatic Performance and Scalability Enhancements, Intelligent Content Analysis and Parametric Search.
ISYS made some significant management changes over the past few months and they are clearly moving along with their marketing efforts as they recognize the value of expanding the re-seller partnership options. Customer comments that come my way continue to be favorable and they have a good story to tell.
Data Search Technology Used by FBI Makes its Way to Enterprises. eWeek New York, NY, April 29, 2009
Add Chiliad to the list of platform search engines, now that they are being highlighted for their value at the FBI. With deep (20+ years) roots in government programs (including early DARPA research and later the SBIR) and a burst of interest and investment by the government after 9/11, Chiliad is taking its venture into more commercial opportunities. We will see how they stack up against the big players in the marketplace. They must have learned something as they worked to “connect the dots” for the FBI.
There have been a lot more stories this past month, but these notices are the ones that kept me engaged in contemplating the enterprise search marketplace that just keeps putting up more options.
Coveo announced the general availability of Coveo Enterprise Search (CES) 6.0. The new Coveo CES 6.0 platform provides a combination of enterprise-grade scalability, deep connectivity and security to data repositories and performance improvements. Some of Coveo Enterprise Search 6.0’s key features include: Improved scalability with up to 50 million documents per server, faster query performance and contextual faceted search; Coveo’s unified view‚ Out-of-the-box ability to create unlimited unified interfaces, providing users with a tabbed search interface for optimized access to information; Deep connectivity, which enables companies to leverage existing and legacy IT assets; New and improved connectors and interfaces‚ Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes, Salesforce.com, Open Text LiveLink, Confluence, Quest Archive Manager, SiteCore, Symantec Enterprise Vault, etc.; A customizable super-user mode that can be integrated in the search interface for enterprise-wide content discovery across all employee data, and; Extended capabilities for mobile phones‚ Contextual faceted search & filtering, added support for intranet (SharePoint, etc) and CRM (Salesforce.com), document quick view (for a device friendly, low-bandwidth access to documents), conversation tracking and people search. http://www.coveo.com
Autonomy Corporation plc (LSE:AU. or AU.L) unveiled a new Expertise Location module for its iManage Universal Search (IUS) solution, the company’s pan-enterprise search solution tailored for law firms. With this new module, lawyers can connect with other subject matter experts within the law firm, enabling the firm to efficiently staff matters and match the right talent with the needs of a case. Powered by Autonomy’s Meaning Based Computing platform, IDOL, the IUS Expertise Location module supports a law firm’s complete practice support needs on a single platform. IUS leverages IDOL’s ability to automatically build conceptual profiles of users based on the understanding of information. As lawyers interact with information as part of their daily routine in the iManage WorkSite document and email management system or IUS such as create or view documents, respond to emails, create time entry systems, etc., IUS can automatically build a profile of the user in real-time. As a result, IUS can identify experts within the law firm and connect their expertise with the most relevant information from multiple content repositories. With IDOL’s meaning-based approach, a user can find an expert even if the exact search terms are not included in the users’ profile. For example, searching for an expert in ‘copyright law’ will also show experts in conceptually related areas, such as ‘trademark’. The Expertise Location module is an add-on to iManage Universal Search and is available now. http://www.autonomy.com/imanage
Your best expert resource for discovering products and tools for your enterprise is the network you trust most and communicate with the most comfortably. It is well established that a great trait to bring into any professional situation is the ability to listen. Sometimes it is hard to remember that when you are being asked a lot of questions. So, the best way to get a jump start on listening is to come to professional meetings with a list of questions you want to get answered before the meeting wraps up.
One of my own discoveries is that whether I am conducting a meeting, moderating or just attending, seeking out people who might have experiences that could be educational for me is both a way to get into a nice business relationship but it also helps break the ice. It can be awkward going to meetings where we know nobody in advance. Having an agenda that involves meeting people is the ultimate networking model. You might notice that a lot of social networking sites, like LinkedIn, have included a function for asking questions. This has proven popular and I know several people who have leveraged it in beneficial ways.
I have just come from two days at the Infonortics Search Engine meeting and many of you will soon be attending the Enterprise Search Summit in New York, The Gilbane Group conference in San Francisco or SemTech 2009 in San Jose. Here are a few suggestions on how to go shopping for great insight on search tools while establishing a relationship could nurture both you and those you engage for many years to come. Any one of these can start the conversation but think ahead about what you want to ask next once you have your initial answer:
Q: Hi, are you at this conference because you are just beginning to look for a search engine or to find answers about one you are already using? Depending on the answer you will want to find out what they have used, looked at, tested or are researching and what they have learned in the process.
Q: Hi, I see you are from ABC Corporation. How are you involved with search technology there? The answer will give you an idea what line of questioning you might pursue based on the person’s presumed experience and knowledge. IT people, developers, content managers or expert searchers will each have a different view of the technologies they have or would like to use. Any role offers a unique perspective for you to draw out and understand for your own institution. Knowing how different professionals view search in other organizations can give you insight into the people you may have to team with in your own organization.
Q: Have you heard any talks at this meeting that have been particularly helpful for you? What have you learned that you didn’t know about before? Follow up, and if you sense that some expertise you have might be interesting, sharing it can begin to build a trusted exchange that might prove helpful to you both.
Q: What are a couple of mandatory requirements for a search engine in your organization? Have you been using anything recently that you feel is serving you well or are you having problems? Any time you get a response from another attendee that indicates they are experienced and engaged with specific products, learn everything you can about their: selection process, implementation, deployment and user experiences. Talk to them about what their objectives were and whether and how those were met.
Going to meetings, chatting up attendees, asking questions, and sharing what you know are great ways to build a community of practice outside your internal communities. This brings fresh insights and gives you a valuable networking resource. Don’t leave without contact information so you can continue the dialogue. Continue it with online exchanges based on their preference for communication.
Finally, the expense of going to meetings is increasingly hard to justify. But the benefit of finding key vendors and others with a common purpose in one place where you can quickly coalesce around the topic of search (or any other topic) gives you an easy sociability that can then be sustained. To solidify what you have learned and from whom, write a trip report; broadly disseminate it to all those in your enterprise network or team, as well as your boss. This sharing will be appreciated and should underscore the value you know how to accrue from technical meetings. Learning is an essential part of job growth and letting others know that you do it well is important.
ISYS Search Software announced the arrival of ISYS:sdk 9, the company’s next-generation enterprise search integration kit for original equipment manufacturers (OEM), independent software vendors (ISV) and systems integrators. ISYS:sdk 9 offers customers several major enhancements, all designed to deliver the performance, scalability and accuracy required for empowering third-party applications with search. Most significantly, ISYS has expanded its core engine’s content mining capabilities using deterministic and reliable methods that help customers better understand their content. Through its Intelligent Content Analysis, ISYS notes key characteristics about a content collection, such as metadata patterns and entities, thus enabling OEMs to leverage these facets for improved search and discovery. ISYS’ Intelligent Content Analysis identifies characteristics can that can be exploited by OEMs to bolster their applications with greater content mining capabilities, an increasingly critical requirement in compliance and ediscovery applications. ISYS’ Intelligent Content Analysis manifests itself in the form of several parametric search and refinement options, all of which are callable from a variety of languages, including C++, C#, VB.NET and Java. The core ISYS indexing engine can be configured to note aspects like entities in the full text (e.g., names, locations); commonly recurring metadata values in semi-structured and database formats; location of files; dates and numbers; and position of words. http://www.isys-search.com
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