Fast Search & Transfer announced its agreement to purchase selected assets of Convera Corporation. Under the terms of the signed agreement, FAST will acquire the assets of Convera’s RetrievalWare business which supports a wide range of mission-critical programs at government agencies and commercial enterprises. The acquisition, priced at $23 million, will help FAST expand its presence primarily in the government markets. Convera and FAST have also announced that Convera has licensed FAST Ad Momentum, a private-label contextual advertising and monetization platform developed with the support of online publishers. FAST Ad Momentum will be integrated with Convera’s hosted vertical search solution and its Publisher Control Panel. Expected to close in the second quarter, the acquisition is limited to Convera’s RetrievalWare business. Convera will continue to trade under the NASDAQ symbol CNVR. http://www.fastsearch.com, http://www.convera.com/
Category: Enterprise search & search technology (Page 40 of 60)
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.
Join us on April 11, 8:30 am at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco for Gilbane San Francisco 2007
We have expanded our opening keynote to include a special debate between Microsoft and Google on Enterprise Search and Information Access, in addition to our discussion on all content technologies with IBM, Oracle & Adobe.
You still have time to join us for this important and lively debate at the Palace Hotel, April 11. The keynote is open to all attendees, even those only planning to visit the technology showcase. The full keynote runs from 8:30am to 10:15am followed by a coffee break and the opening of the technology showcase, and now includes:
Keynote Panel: Content Technology Industry Update PART 2
Google and Microsoft are competing in many areas on many levels. One area which both are ramping-up quickly is enterprise search. In this part of the opening keynote, we bring the senior product managers face to face to answer our questions about their plans and what this means for enterprise information access and content management strategies.
Moderator: Frank Gilbane, Conference Chair, CEO, Gilbane Group, Inc.
Panelists:
Jared Spataro, Group Product Manager, Enterprise Search, Microsoft
Nitin Mangtani, Lead Product Manager, Google Search Appliance, Google
See the complete keynote description.
Gilbane San Francisco 2007
Content management, enterprise search, localization, collaboration, wikis, publishing …
Complete conference information is at http://gilbanesf.com/07/conference_grid.html
Last week I began this entry, re-considered how to make the point and tucked it away. Today I unearthed an article I had not gotten around to putting into my database of interesting and useful citations. Lisa Nadile in The ABCs of Search Engine Marketing, in CIO Magazine, hits the nail on the head with this statement, “Each search engine has its own top-secret algorithm to analyze this data…” This is tongue in cheek so you need to read the whole article to get the humor. Ms. Nadile’s article is geared to Internet marketing but the comments about search engines are just a relevant for enterprise search.
I may be an enterprise search analyst but there are a lot of things I don’t know about the guts of current commercial search tools. Some things I could know if I am willing to spend months studying patents and expensive reports, while other things are protected as trade secrets. I will never know what is under the hood of most products. Thirty years ago I knew a lot about relatively simple concepts like b-tree indexes and hierarchical, relational, networked and associative data structures for products I used and developed.
My focus has shifted to results and usability. My client has to be able to find all the content in their content repository or crawled site. If not, it had better be easy to discover why, and simple to take corrective actions with the search engine’s administration tools, if that is where the problem lies. If the scope of the corpus of content to be searched is likely to grow to hundreds of thousands of documents, I also care about hardware resource requirements and performance (speed) and scalability. And, if you have read previous entries, you already know that I care a lot about service and business relationships with the vendor because that is crucial to long term success. No amount of “whiz bang” technology will overcome a lousy client/vendor relationship.
Finding out what is going on under the hood with some imponderable algorithms isn’t really going to do me or my client any good when evaluating search products. Either the search tool finds stuff the way my client wants to find it, or it doesn’t. “Black art,” trade secret or “patent protected” few of us would really understand the secret sauce anyway.
Finally there is some quantitative research on enterprise use of blogs, wikis, tagging, etc. to complement the very informal surveys we have taken, and the work done at the University of Massachusetts. Reports from Forrester (CIOs Want Suites For Web 2.0) and McKinsey (How businesses are using Web 2.0: A McKinsey Global Survey) published this week provide interesting, though not surprising, data. The McKinsey report is free with registration, and the Forrester report isn’t expensive.
I haven’t read the Forrester report (119 CIOs), but the executive summary focuses on their finding that most CIOs want to buy enterprise social software in suite form from large vendors rather from the smaller specialist software vendors. This fact itself is of course totally predictable, but it raises two interesting issues. First, just what are all the larger vendors, as well as midsize (e.g., content management vendors) doing about all this? (Short answer – all are doing something, but the details are often vague.) Second, what will be lost or gained in the process of force-fitting the “engage and collaborate” functions and culture into the “command and control” (last week’s post) of top-down IT directives?
The McKinsey report (2847 executives, 44% C-level) found “widespread but careful interest” in “Web 2.0 technologies”, and that they are strategic and will be invested in. I think their conclusion might be a little overly conservative given their findings. For example, 77% of retail and 74% of high tech plan to increase investment in these technologies. Note, however that McKinsey includes web services as a “Web 2.0” technology which not everyone would agree with.
See comments on these reports from Nick Carr, who points out where the Forrester and McKinsey findings differ. And see Richard MacManus’ comments on what the Forrester findings mean for the startups in this space.
For a couple of vendor perspectives, Socialtexts’ Ross Mayfield covers these findings here, and FAST’s Hadley Reynolds talks about some similar research they have been working on with the Economist here.
Also (while not commenting on these reports) Andrew McAfee provides some info on how he is seeing enterprises using these technologies.
My last blog was in reaction to two recent vendor experiences. One had just briefed me on an enterprise search offering; the other had been ignoring my client’s efforts to get software support, training and respond to bug reports. The second blogged a reaction with a patronizing: “So Lynda should not feel too bad. I know its (sic) frustrating to deal with vendors but not all vendors are the same and she certainly hasn’t tried us all.”
With dozens of vendors offering search tools, it was fair to assume that I haven’t tried them all. However, having used search engines of all types since 1974 both as a researcher and analyst I have a pretty good sense of what’s out there. Having evaluated products for clients, and for embedded use in products I brought to market for over 20 years, it doesn’t take me long with a new product to figure out where the problems are. I also talk to a lot of vendors, search users, and read more reports and evaluations than I can count. The evidence about any one product’s strengths and weaknesses piles up pretty quickly. “Searching” for stuff about search has been my career and I do make it my business to keep score on products.
I’m going to continue to hold my counsel on naming different search tools that I’ve experienced for the time being. Instead, in this blog I’ll focus on keeping buyers informed about search technologies in general. My work as a consultant is about helping specific clients look at the best and most appropriate options for the search problems they are trying to solve and to help guide their selection process. Here is some quick generic guidance on making your first search tool choice:
- If you have not previously deployed an enterprise search solution in your domain for the corpus of content you plan to search, do not begin with the highest priced licenses. They are often also the most costly and lengthy implementations and it will take many months to know if a solution will work for you over the long haul.
- Do begin with one or more low cost solutions to learn about search, search product administration, and search engine tuning. This helps you discover what issues and problems are likely to arise, and it will inform you about what to expect (or want) in a more sophisticated solution. You may even discover that a lower cost solution will do just fine for the intended application.
- Do execute hundreds of searches yourself on a corpus of content with which you are very familiar. You want to learn if you can actually find all the content you know is there, and how the results are returned and displayed.
- Do have a variety of types of potential searchers test-drive the installed product over a period of time, review the search logs to get a sense of how they approach searching; then debrief them about their experiences, and whether their search expectations were met.
It is highly unlikely that the first enterprise search product you procure will be the best and final choice. Experience will give you a much better handle on the next selection. It is certainly true that not all vendors or products are the same but you need to do serious reality-based evaluations to learn your most important differentiators.
I had a briefing from a vendor that is a strong contender for a piece of the enterprise search market this week. The offering is impressive, other reviews have given it high technical marks and the pricing model is reasonable. But because I am currently immersed in the deployment of another enterprise search engine with a client, the issue of vendor client relationship is foremost in my focus.
I asked the CEO of this relatively new offering, what are the fundamental assumptions his company makes about customer technology environments (e.g. the mix of software applications, hardware environment) and the competencies required to integrate his software with that environment. His answer was given strictly in terms of what the IT staff needs to know to bring the product online. My question did have several levels of complexity and was probably badly phrased but I was trying to make a point by asking it.
There are three specific elements missing from search vendors:
- Documentation or explicit models for deployment in environments where there are numerous technological variables to be considered
- Availability of training that takes into consideration the context for enterprise search in a specific customer’s organization
- Frank discussions with customers that set expectations about deployment and implementation, potential bottlenecks, and the need for experienced searchers, search analysts and subject matter experts on the team with the IT group
Downloading software and using automatic installers has become routine; with the launch of a menu and a few simple clicks on boxes on an administrative screen, vendors can claim “out-of-the-box” functionality. Never mind that what you find when you first search your targeted domain is nonsensical, the software finds “stuff.”
The IT guys are happy because it was easy to install, met their architecture requirement and, knowing little about the actual corpus of content, they are satisfied that everything works.
I am in a bit of a pickle with the current project, software from another vendor, because:
- What the documentation says will happen when I make certain choices in the set-up does not, in fact, happen when a search is executed
- My attempts through email and phone to schedule training have gone unanswered
- My messages to the support service citing problems also get no response
I’ve only spent two weeks trying to get this software working but three weeks ago, on a holiday, I got a briefing from two executives from this firm because they were “going to be in the area” and wanted face time with a search analyst. Knowing my role as an analyst and as a client you would think they’d answer my phone calls.
What is it that makes the customer experience so easily ignored? All these products look great in demos; what is under the hood is often technologically wonderful but, boy, getting them to work in my environment always seems to be one long nightmare. I wish I could find out what I really need to know. A terrific search engine might help.
SearchBlox Software, Inc. has released SearchBlox Content Search Software Version 4.0 with replication support and a completely re-designed AJAX-based Admin Console. The new release also supports hit highlighting of search terms in HTML and PDF documents. The replication feature, available in SearchBlox ENTERPRISE Edition, keeps search indexes in multiple instances of SearchBlox synchronized. Using the new replication feature, search applications can be deployed using multiple instances of SearchBlox. The new release also features a new AJAX-based Admin Console which makes the management of SearchBlox Content Search Software more interactive. The new UI hides the complexities of managing the built-in HTTP, File system and RSS crawlers and makes the software accessible to novice users. SearchBlox is 100% Java and uses the open source Apache Lucene search API. SearchBlox supports indexing and searching of content in 37 languages and can be deployed on any platform that supports Java. It been tested on Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, UNIX, IBM AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, and z/OS operating systems. SearchBlox can be deployed as a J2EE Web Component to all major J2EE Application Servers including BEA Weblogic, JBoss, IBM Websphere, Oracle OAS, JRun and Apache Tomcat. It is also available as a standalone server for Windows, Mac OS X and Unix/Linux platforms. The SearchBlox Free Edition is available free of charge and can index up to 1000 documents. The software can be downloaded from http://www.searchblox.com/.
IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced that it is bringing Google Gadgets – or consumer-style web utilities – into commercial portal software. Available at no cost to WebSphere Portal and WebSphere Portal Express Version 6.0 customers, IBM now lets users create, customize and use rich Internet applications with Google Gadgets directly from within WebSphere Portal so they appear as ready-to-use services. Users can choose from nearly 4,000 Google Gadgets such as language translators, package delivery tracking, Podcast searches, Wikipedia information, YouTube postings and more. These features can be offered through a company’s portal with a click of a button. IBM is also announcing its search sitemap utility, based on a new sitemap protocol, agreed on by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, that will make it possible to optimize publication of portal content for improved search by public search engines. This feature also includes the ability to notify search engines of the update frequency, last modification date, and relative priority of the content that is being published. The end result is an improved content relationship with external search engines so that all of the public content in a portal can be found and crawled efficiently. The IBM Portlet for Google Gadgets will be available in April via IBM WebSphere Portal catalog. WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 customers, including those using WebSphere Portal Express to deploy solutions for Small and Medium Sized businesses and WebSphere Portal Server Version 6.0 are entitled to use Google Gadget at no cost. Enablement for the Sitemap 0.90 protocol will be delivered for WebSphere Portal as a sitemap utility that customers can download from the WebSphere Portal catalog later in 2007. http://catalog.lotus.com/wps/portal/portal, http://www.sitemaps.org/
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