MarketLive, Inc. announced that it has teamed with Endeca to introduce new MarketLive Intelligent Site Search and Navigation. Designed for online retailers, MarketLive Intelligent Site Search and Navigation includes search, Guided Navigation and Dynamic Merchandising capabilities powered by Endeca and will be offered as a component of the MarketLive E-commerce Platform. MarketLive Intelligent Site Search will be generally available to new and existing MarketLive v5 customers in Q1 2007. http://www.endeca.com, http://www.marketlive.com
Category: Enterprise search & search technology (Page 42 of 59)
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.
If you signed up for feeds from this site, new posts have been slow coming. Gilbane’s announcement of an Enterprise Search Practice has not gone unnoticed. The past two weeks have resulted in more good will than this analyst could easily digest and filter. The good news is that ideas for posting on “enterprise search” are already accumulating faster than they can get written, and the number of enthusiastic well-wishers is encouraging. It looks like we have an audience and community of practice in the making. Thank you to all who have sent their support and good cheer.
Quite a number of responses have come from companies who want to discuss their technology offerings and positioning. At Gilbane we are following up on those requests and beginning to schedule time for discussions and presentations. With the recognition that vendors/suppliers of technologies want ink, and plenty of it, comes a responsibility of which I am acutely aware because I was one of that community for over 20 years. Having founded, in 1980, and lead an integrated library automation firm in the corporate arena, I know how industry press coverage can make or break the fortunes of even the best offerings. While blogs are intended to launch and promote discussions, even play devil’s advocate, I don’t take this role lightly. Every good intention and hard work by vendors deserves thoughtful and unbiased consideration. It deserves to have analysts who know what they are talking about, and those that would present what they can fairly assess in a useful context. The very definition of analyst (noun) supposes a responsible action, to analyze (verb) the offerings. While my analysis may not focus on what a vendor wants me to consider, it will try to present information that is both helpful and thought-provoking without being mean-spirited or dismissive, and content that helps potential users of the technology focus their own choices and decisions.
Now it’s time to get down to business and start making this a more frequent happening. Based on a number of comments, let’s begin with clarifying what we mean by enterprise search at Gilbane. While the marketplace often categorizes enterprise search as a specific kind of search product, we at Gilbane don’t. Any technology that serves any type of enterprise by helping it find electronic or physical content through an electronic search interface is fair game. Enterprise search is about looking for content in the organization or for the organization. It may be embedded in a specialized application, may be a platform designed to collectively search and aggregate content from many internal silos, or it may combine search of desktops, enterprise hard drives and the Internet. There is a very big universe of content out there; enterprises need all the search tools they can (afford to) leverage to harvest what they need and when they need it.
Now this analyst’s job is to give you a balance between what the vendors are saying and offering, and what the users really need, and get the two engaging more effectively with each other.
SearchInform Technologies Inc. introduced a new version of SearchInform, a program of full text search and search for documents with similar content, featuring new interface settings as well as an enhanced functionality. In the new version, owing to implementation of new auto searching servers, work with previously created indexes stored in the local network became less complicated. Now whenever you want to add a new index, SearchInform will automatically scan the network and show all existing indexes available for connection. SearchInform Servers performance in the local network has been enhanced and the analysis function upgraded leading to improved performance. Main features of SearchInform 3.2.08. Phrase search with due consideration to stemming and thesaurus, New SoftInform Search Technology of search for similar documents, High indexing speed (from 15 to 30 Gb/hour), Index size of 15-25% from the actual size of the text data, Query caching system, and Support of over 60 text formats including Outlook & TheBat electronic messages, mp3 & avi tags, and logs of MSN and ICQ instant messaging programs. http://www.searchinform.com/
Inxight Software, Inc. announced that that it has established a strategic business relationship with Iknow LLC to jointly develop and market advanced informatics solutions. Inxight’s federated search, extraction and visualization products enable enterprise, government and OEM customers to turn unstructured and structured text into actionable information. Inxight solutions allow its users to access, extract and be alerted to relevant information contained in the open Web, deep Web (patent databases, SEC filings), subscription sites, and internal data sources. Powered by Inxight’s ThingFinder entity extraction, search results are automatically clustered on the fly, enabling users to filter their search results by the people, companies, places, concepts and other information contained within them. This reduces time to information and enables users to locate hidden information and make better decisions. The companies will initially focus on three industry sectors: pharmaceuticals, legal and government. The companies anticipate announcing several joint solutions in 2007. http://www.inxight.com, http://www.iknow.us.com
Mediasurface and Google have signed a distribution agreement in which Mediasurface will bundle the Google Search Appliance with Morello, its web content management system enabling the two organisations to provide web content management and corporate search facilities in one offering. As part of the agreement, an interface between Morello and the Google Search Appliance has been developed; enabling Morello to use the Google Search Appliance to deliver highly relevant search results. Mediasurface can now deliver the same Google search experience while searching content managed by Morello on public websites and intranets. The security model within Morello is fully maintained; a search will only retrieve and display content relevant to the access privileges of the user. The integration between Morello and Google Search Appliance ensures that a richer and relevant set of content is delivered than would have been available previously by adding in metadata such as the original content author, the date the content was first published, keywords, and so on, which is held separately within the CMS. The Morello content author can create “keymatch” terms that relate to an item of content and enabling certain content to appear at the top of a search result. Morello and the Google Search Appliance can now group and manage information for specific audiences so if, for example, someone searches for technical data on a product, they can select the technical collection and avoid the brochures. http://www.mediasurface.com
Enterprise Search has been an illusive dream for too many organizations for too many years. Search technology is ubiquitous but the “holy grail” for most organizations is to be able to find all content within the organization through a single query interface. My instinct is to give a chronology of search over the past four or five decades to guide your understanding of why enterprise search has remained so “out of reach.” I could also describe the ways in which search technologies have evolved and morphed with hundreds of functions and thousands of features. It would certainly help explain why the typical company has a daunting task narrowing its options but it would probably not quicken the selection process.
For now, one view of the current market segmentation is a starting point. Sue Feldman, Research VP, Content Management and Retrieval Solutions at IDC, gave the audience a high level view of the market in a session at Gilbane Boston 2006. She placed enterprise search technology into three big buckets: Appliances and Downloadable Search, Enterprise Search (software) Platforms, and Application Specific Search embedded with other software. She then broadly described the features and functions that characterize each major type. If you have grown up with search in your professional life for over 30 years as I have, it makes perfect sense that this is what we have come to in the market but differentiating the options is a step far less clear-cut.
After the sessions, 15 conference-goers joined me to continue discussing and learning about enterprise search in a roundtable forum. It was hard to know which end of the search animal we should address first to help everyone speak the same language. That is precisely what is making this marketplace such a tough one. Vendors represent a huge variety of solutions, each positioning product(s) for a problem of their definition, offering technology that targets the specific problem. Buyers have multiple search needs but still want a single solution. Further complicating the mix is a dizzying array of search jargon. With vendors and buyers using their own language the market is, frankly, a real mess.
Take Ms. Feldman’s three big buckets and think of one example of search product in each category. Now think about all the types of searches that people in your organization need to perform just to get their routine work done:
- Looking up an address in a directory
- Finding an image for a presentation
- Retrieving a press release your department issued last year on a new product
- Locating a configuration change to a piece of equipment in manufacturing
- and so on…
Can you imagine any single search interface or product from the tools you know that would give you the means to find all of these pieces of information? Can you imagine a single search tool that would answer your query in a couple of simple steps, and able to perform the functions right out of the box? Simple solutions that address the complexity of business variables and technology standards in most organizations make any single solution an unlikely candidate at a reasonable cost.
Blog readers can request answers to questions, ask for help with sorting out the marketplace or definitions to understand the jargon. I invite readers to tell me what you think needs to be talked about and I’ll give it my best shot. What do you need to know first to tread through the search marketplace?
Google announced new features for the Google Search Appliance that give enterprise customers the ability to customize search results for their individual corporate environments. The Google Search Appliance now also offers improved integration with Google services as well as additional content sources. New features include Results Hit Clustering and Source Biasing. Results Hit Clustering are groups of dynamically formed sub-categories based on the results of each search query. These clusters appear at the top of search results and help searchers refine their queries from possible ambiguous terms. For example, if an employee searches for “customer” on the company network, a set of categories could appear at the top of the results with groups of topics such as “customer support” or “customer contacts” to help guide the search. Administrators can customize the location and appearance of Results Hit Clustering within search results. Source Biasing enables administrators to assign various weights to search results on their corporate network, based on source or type of content. For instance, if a company has multiple Documentum servers, the site administrator can strengthen the content from the one primary Documentum server. The same is true for types of content. If a financial services corporation values content in .pdf form more than content in a word processing document, administrators can use Source Biasing to increase the weight of .pdfs in the search results. A menu-driven interface allows weak or strong increases or decreases, and requires no complex coding or scripting. The new version of the Google Search Appliance also adds improved integration with Google Sitemaps export (for simpler export of information about web pages available for crawling), as well as open source connectors for indexing content in SharePoint 2003 and SharePoint 2007. http://www.google.com/enterprise/gsa/
Recommind announced the next generation of its MindServer platform, featuring new eDiscovery functionality that enables enterprises to locate electronically stored information (ESI) that must be preserved for ongoing or anticipated litigation. In addition, MindServer 5.0 makes it easier for OEM partners and independent software vendors to embed MindServer enterprise search and categorization capabilities within their products and provide customers with richer capabilities for searching and managing critical information. MindServer 5.0 is able to find, within the enterprise, potentially relevant and responsive information that must be preserved as part of a litigation hold, a requirement of any legal proceeding. In many enterprise environments, the MindServer platform itself can lock down any document or other piece of information returned in a search query. Otherwise, MindServer 5.0 is able to pass the result set from any query to a separate application, such as a content management system or database, for immediate litigation hold lock-down. In addition, only MindServer 5.0 supports multi-selection filters within the user interface, a prerequisite for the highly comprehensive and detailed searches needed for effective litigation hold. The platform’s improved APIs enable knowledge and content management, email archiving, and eDiscovery system vendors to incorporate Recommind’s enterprise search functionality into their products. MindServer 5.0 also incorporates improvements to search relevancy and ease of use, delivers faster query performance, simplifies integration with Microsoft SharePoint Portal and other existing systems, and provides enhanced reporting capabilities. Recommind MindServer 5.0 is available immediately. http://www.recommind.com
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