My family and I recently hiked to the top of the Pinnacle at Steep Rock—apt name. It is a very steep rock, but the view from the top is worth the climb: a panorama of the Litchfield hills and Lake Waramaug, Connecticut’s second-largest natural lake. After the 45-minute hike, my 4-year-old did a happy dance and wondered aloud, "Can we see the university from here?" Okay, the view is good, but the nearest university is about 40 miles away and it’s doubtful she’s aware of its existence, much less what it looks like or where to look for it. Suffice it to say, this gave us pause.

Then my husband did a remarkable thing: He asked her if she meant, "Can we see the universe?" He’d automatically shifted into "did you mean?" mode, and pulled the right word out of his lexicographic hat. I’d stalled marveling at her early awareness of higher education while he actually figured out what she was getting at. I suppose he’d unconsciously made the connection because both words are derived from the Latin universitas, meaning the whole, total, world, universe/university.

This sort of agile thinking is something we do everyday. Perhaps we miss a word or two on a bad phone connection, or we don’t express our thoughts clearly in an email, yet the person on the other end of the communication detects myriad clues from context or experience to interpret meaning, or asks follow-up questions for clarification.

With my first experience chairing the Enterprise Search Summit just (as I write) completed in May and my second coming up in September (about 6 weeks after this column is published due to print lead time), I have been focused on search. One thing I’ve found is that at such targeted events it is easy to lose sight of the reality for the average worker. Some exhibitors, for example, question the number of "beginner" sessions on the program, feeling that the market has matured to the extent that everyone is looking for an enterprise solution that is way past simple text, nay, verging on artificial intelligence.

However, the beginner sessions, such as the nuts and bolts of selecting a search engine, remain the best attended. Judging by the full rooms, decision makers still struggle with how to make search tools usable, particularly as search is the de facto gateway to information in and outside an organization.

As illustrated in my own office—when I witnessed our newest editorial assistant, Eileen Mullan, put a single term into a search box—it is unrealistic to expect the end user to be trained to "search better." The tools have to do the heavy lifting and make the machinations invisible to users. I feel certain that with a year of journalism experience behind her, Eileen will become a more complex searcher, yet the search industry shouldn’t expect her to. While finding information is part of a journalist’s training, better tools enable her to focus more on finding meaning in information rather than investing time in searching or training to search faster.

One of the information industry’s great quests is for smart search, which senses what the user is really looking for and delivers it like magic. More practical routes lead users to what they search for through navigation, clarifying terms, facets, questions, and so on. But I admit it: I like magic. Even if I know that it isn’t real, the illusion of something simply appearing is wonderful. No doubt search is hard, but epic advanced-search interfaces are certainly not the solution.

Since magic isn’t likely to become a solution anytime soon, some think semantic search may be the answer, at least for relational search. Rather than using page rank algorithms, semantic search uses—you guessed it—semantics to produce more relevant results: Does "bark" refer to doggy communication or the surface of a tree? In theory, a semantic engine would "know" that I’ve been hiking, but I wonder if a recent concern about the volume of a canine companion would confuse the engine?

I have peeked at a couple of semantic search applications, such as AskWiki, and I found that they often required more than a single-word search query to achieve the goal of providing "better" answers, which returns me to my qualms about training searchers. Some rely on the natural language approach—phrasing a query as a question, for example—which is a lot better than intricate advanced interfaces. Another tactic, used by IBM’s OmniFind email search, requires users to create "concepts" up front so that a basic keyword search will turn up what a user is really looking for. While the average worker is unlikely to invest this sort of time in setup, some would, and there are organizations that would invest IT resources when deploying certain systems in order to minimize search time for common queries.

While semantic search may not be the search industry’s magic bullet, the exploration of various routes will help users better find their way to the information, and I, for one, am enjoying the view. 

FTI Consulting, Inc., the global business advisory firm, announced that is has signed a merger agreement to acquire Attenex Corporation, an eDiscovery software provider. The total purchase price for the transaction is approximately $88 million in cash and is expected to close in the third quarter of 2008. After amortization of intangibles, the acquisition is expected to be neutral to FTI’s earnings per share in 2008 and accretive in 2009. Attenex Patterns eDiscovery software automates data processing and provides visualization tools for analyzing large amounts of electronically stored information (ESI). Attenex will be integrated into the FTI Technology segment.

 (www.attenex.com, www.fticonsulting.com)

DeviceLock, provider of endpoint device control software solutions, enables security administrators to centrally control, log, and audit end-user access to peripheral devices and local ports from enterprise systems. Using Microsoft Active Directory integration, DeviceLock can be deployed, managed, and administered from within an existing Microsoft AD installation without an additional management server. DeviceLock supports non-Active Directory environments. The dtSearch Engine provides searching of terabytes of data, can index over a terabyte of text in an index, search static and dynamic web-based data sources, popular "Office" file types, SQL, and other databases. After a search, the dtSearch Engine can display web-based documents WYSIWYG, with all links and images intact, and the sole addition of highlighted hits.

(www.devicelock.com, www.dtsearch.com)

NewsGator has released Social Sites 2.0, which it describes as a major upgrade for its social computing solution for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

NewsGator further claims Social Sites and Office SharePoint Server 2007 deliver enterprise-class social computing capabilities that enable businesses to build communities and internal social networks while leveraging existing IT investments and maintaining appropriate security. Social Sites 2.0 is said to integrate seamlessly with Office SharePoint Server 2007 to add value to its social computing features with collaboration tools, enhanced tagging, RSS feed subscriptions and management, colleague tracking features and content mashup capabilities.

The new version of Social Sites:

• allows employees to easily share ideas, information and documents by enabling them to create ad hoc communities around common interests, areas of research, projects, etc.;
• provides for easy discovery of groups via customized recommendations, tag clouds, search and lists of recently created and popular communities;
• offers a discussion component that includes rich e-mail integration, which allows users to participate in a community without ever logging in to the site;
• simplifies content additions by allowing content to be tagged into the community, added via social bookmarks and RSS feeds, or uploaded to a community document store;
• offers chronological views of community activity from both a single community and consolidated from all communities to which a user belongs;
• provides employees with social network graphs based on both explicit and implied connections, making discovery of content and colleagues easier;
• shows each user his or her strongest connections based on common content, interests and intranet activity; and
• recommends colleagues to a user based on common community membership, tags and RSS subscriptions.

After researching a number of enterprise and federated search technology options, the U.K. law firm Farrer & Co. chose Sysero Knowledge Search from UC Logic.

Working with the law firm's intranet platform for collaboration, Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server (MOSS) 2007, SyseroKS provides a single application to search Sharepoint libraries, the firm's document management system and its LexisNexis Interaction customer relationship management (CRM) system. The solution allows staff to search concurrently across documents from the Practical Law Co., LexisNexis Butterworths and Westlaw.

UC Logic reports that Farrer's lawyers can search across all the core systems with a single search from anywhere in MOSS. When searching the document management system, lawyers can filter by client and matter; when searching the CRM system, the technology provides extracts from relevant activities and links to Interaction contacts. A Sharepoint-based knowledge management library has been automatically classified using a legal taxonomy, so lawyers can browse the classifications and search within a classification.

A key feature of the solution is the ability to drill down through large document repositories to find related information.

"The ability to search all areas of the firm's knowledge from one central point is highlighting the hidden value of unstructured data sources," says Anthony Stables, who heads Farrer's IT team.

Baynote, Inc., provider of social search, announced the Baynote Collective Intelligence Platform. The new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution allows businesses to deploy peer-driven recommendations, social search, and other services across multiple channels while also providing a single point of measurement, testing and control. The Collective Intelligence Platform is able to identify and leverage the virtual communities of like-minded site visitors to improve user engagement. The solution combines five new offerings, expanded APIs, and Baynote’s existing recommendations, and social search capabilities in a single platform. Baynote Collective Intelligence Platform components include Baynote email recommendations and mobile recommendations. Baynote’s partners, include Bazaarvoice, Google, Mercado, Omniture, Responsys, and Vignette.

(www.baynote.com)

The ExtraLabs Software company, developer of software for creating RSS feeds, announced the new release of the Easy RSS Content Generator with some new features. Easy RSS Content Generator is a program for creating new content out of news feeds (the RSS, Atom, and RDF formats are supported). Easy RSS Content Generator has a built-in FTP client, an automatic word replacement dictionary and a built-in tool for prompting keywords. You can use it to search for RSS feeds and add them. The program can automatically upload the created HTML pages to a server when specified.

(www.extralabs.net)

Cognition Technologies, the creator of Cognition’s Semantic NLP, the semantic natural language processing technology, announced that it has licensed its technology to Merrill Lextranet, provider of litigation support and case management systems and tools.
Merrill Lextranet has initially integrated Cognition’s Semantic NLP technology into its Document Review service, enabling its users to uncover information and utilize meaning-based search capabilities (as opposed to simple key word search). Cognition employs semantic technology to understand the meanings of words and phrases within context. Cognition’s Semantic NLP enables technologies, such as Merrill Lextranet’s Document Review service, to increase the precision and recall of textual analysis.

(www.cognition.com)