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: Semantic technologies (Page 41 of 72)
Our coverage of semantic technologies goes back to the early 90s when search engines focused on searching structured data in databases were looking to provide support for searching unstructured or semi-structured data. This early Gilbane Report, Document Query Languages – Why is it so Hard to Ask a Simple Question?, analyses the challenge back then.
Semantic technology is a broad topic that includes all natural language processing, as well as the semantic web, linked data processing, and knowledge graphs.
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
Exalead announced an OEM agreement with Messaging Architects, a specialist in Risk Management software and services for enterprise e-mail systems. Under the terms of the agreement, Messaging Architects will integrate the unified, secure exalead one:search platform into its enterprise-class GWArchive 3.5 solution, which is designed to help organizations address the challenges of e-mail retention, regulatory compliance, storage and retrieval. By embedding exalead one:search technology into GWArchive, customers will be able to retrieve archived e-mails through a unified user interface. GWArchive, which is designed for Novell Groupwise Collaboration software users, offers enterprise-class storage management, policy-based retention, full information lifecycle management for e-mail and long-term data portability. The exalead one:search platform complies with an organization’s existing security policy to prevent e-mail messages from being viewed or retrieved by employees without permission. Further, exalead one:search offers several advanced search capabilities that allows users to find relevant information quickly, even if they do not know its exact location or the content within the e-mail. Users can narrow or broaden the search for a particular e-mail message based on keywords, date range, author and recipient, whether it had an attachment, or based on the text within an attachment, among other parameters. Exalead also offers a fuzzy matching capability that allows users to search phonetically. http://www.messagingarchitects.com/, http://exalead.com/
Subscribe to the Gilbane Advisor
