ORGANIZATION:  Dow Jones & Co., www.solutions.dowjones.com, www.factiva.com

VENDOR OR SOLUTION PROVIDER OF CHOICE:  FAST, www.fastsearch.com

From ‘Flimsie’ to Foremost

By definition, "flimsy" doesn’t mean much. But for Charles Dow, Edward Jones, and Charles Bergstresser in 1882 New York City, it was everything. The first product the trio generated through their newly formed Dow Jones & Co. was a handwritten daily news bulletin—a "flim­sie"—they then delivered to subscribers in the city’s financial district. Numerous iconic business information resources would follow, including The Wall Street Journal (in 1889), the Dow Jones Industrial Average (1896), and Barron’s (1921). Today,Dow Jones & Co.’s market position as a business content and information services powerhouse is irrefutable, especially after its late 2007 acquisition by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

Formed in 1999 as a joint venture of Dow Jones and Reuters, the Dow Jones Factiva subsidiary of the Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group (EMG) aggregates and sells online business news and information to global enterprises in the financial, corporate, professional services, and government sectors. Its flagship product, Factiva.com, debuted in 2001 as a means of delivering"world-class content alongside an organization’s internal data to enterprise in formation solutions," says Bill Flannery, director of strategic technologies for Dow Jones EMG. Solely owned by Dow Jones since 2006, Factiva offers role-based applications and tools (among them Factiva iWorks and FactivaReader) tailored to meet the information needs of professional and nonprofessional researchers and entire organizations. It services nearly 1.8 million paying subscribers, including BP, Cisco, and Ernst & Young.

Overcoming Information Overload

According to IDC, business profes­sionals spend more than 25% of their workweek looking for internal and external information to support business decisions; more than 50% of those searches are unsuccessful. In a 2005 report on text mining, IDC drew attention to the "alarming fact" that "there’s already more information flooding into most organizations than any one person,or even a large team of people, can get through in a day. Most individuals manage to survive this deluge by ignoring large parts of it. But organizations can’t afford to ignore it."

Flannery acknowledges that information overload "has long been a problem for all businesspeople, who are also pressed for time to make decisions." For the information and PR professionals, knowledge managers, CIOs, and marketing and product management executives who rely on information to do their jobs better, success is inextricably tied to the quality of searches. Flannery says Dow Jones Factiva’s customer feedback-driven product development convinced company executives that "customers needed new methods of sifting through large quantities of content and quicker ways of retrieving information."

In 2003 Factiva began looking at available technologies that"would expand our capabilities to meet these requirements while delivering meaningful content that was relevant to customers’ job functions." Factiva was looking specifically for a scalable solution that would deliver backwards capability with Dow Jones’ existing search services; retain sophisticated Boolean search capabilities; and support relevancy ranking, contextual snippets, intelligent indexing, and other parameters and controls that tinformation experts have come to rely on. "We knew users would quickly adopt technologies that speed their access to content, which is where current websearch engines fall short," Flannery explains. "Newer technologies—like information visualization and text mining—and the sophisticated use of taxonomies and ontologies had made the process of scrolling through lists of headlines and websites obsolete."

Giving Factiva subscribers a better search experience wouldmean deploying those technologies in new ways. "We believed enterprises would demand a role-based envi­ronment," Flannery says—one in which systems "are smart enough to understand knowledge workers as individuals— their industries, their jobs,and their daily tasks—and then help them accomplish relevant tasks more effectively."

FAST Forward

The Dow Jones Factiva team spent much of 2004 looking for a technology partner to help them achieve those goals. After considering four vendors and an open source candidate, they tapped Fast Search & Transfer (FAST) for the job that December.

Headquartered in Oslo, Norway, with offices on six continents, FAST delivers enterprise search technologies and solutions to innovative companies such as AOL, Dell, and LexisNexis. Its core product, FAST ESP, is a flexible, scalable enterprise search platform that allows for the production of searchable indexes. According to Flannery, FAST was "strategically aligned with our thinking in terms of metadata and provided new ways to link unstructured content with the structured assets we already had in place."What’s more, its suburban Boston- and Oslo-based development team was"willing to extend FAST ESP’s search capabilities to support our needs and legacy search capabilities."

Factiva and FAST worked together throughout 2005 to leverage Factiva’s key assets using the "Contextual Insight" capabilities FAST ESP provides. "Most of our focus was on system engineering with respect to scale, content volume, and update and query rates," Flannery says of the development process. "Equally important were the extensions FAST gave its engine to support functionality. Results are still based on the company’s extensive collection of business information, but in Search 2.0, "the way you see them is far more useful," Flannery explains. A central feature is the Discovery Pane on the right side of the results page, which delivers a graphics-driven "visualization of company and industry news, highlights at a glance, and issues and trends "that are relevant to the user doing the backward compatibility with our legacy search products. Through our source-processing of the content, we had valuable metadata to populate the fields with, which FAST calls ‘navigators.’

For Factiva Search 2.0, we created a ‘charting’ service in our platform to drive visualization as a tool for discovery to provide a more intuitive user experience. Selecting the number of navigators in a FAST-based system is an important configuration step, as a balance must be struck between system resources consumed and the other parameters of the search system you’re building."

Other configuration aspects that impact the user experience "are the creation of rank profiles for relevancy ranking of results and the choice of a teaser configuration to define a dynamic contextual snippet of text for each hit in a search result," he continues. "For rank profiles, we chose a balance between document rele­vancy based on [the] location of query terms in a document, the proximity of the terms to each other, and the freshness of the document. For the teaser, we had to have a configuration that met the contractual obligations of our information providers."

Dow Jones Factiva unveiled Factiva Search 2.0 on Jan. 18, 2006. Product highlights included true web searches ranked by relevancy or date; contextual snippets that determine article relevance; powerful filters that organize search results into logical clusters by subjects, companies,industries, sources,and news concepts; and data visualization search (based on his or her role within the organization). Because the pane is intuitive and interactive, users can easily navigate to deeper levels of information as needed.

By leveraging text-mining technologies, advanced content visualization, and Factiva’s patented Intelligent Indexing taxonomy, Flannery says Factiva Search 2.0 helps business pros "quickly find the information they need to support critical business decisions." With it, they "can now see relationships among various pieces of information"— an outcome, he adds, "that would be extremely labor-intensive to identify without the new technology."

Three Years Later

As with all Factiva products, Search 2.0 delivers content (much of it updated continuously) from more than 19,000 publication, website,and picture sources worldwide. A few things have changed since its launch,however.

In August 2006, Simba reported that Dow Jones Factiva had reached the No. 1 market position in the Current Awareness News and Research Online industry. In April 2008, FAST became a Microsoft subsidiary. And in August 2008, Outsell’s "Search, Aggregation & Syndication: 2007 Final Market Size and Share Report" ranked Dow Jones Factiva "above our top traditional competitors and among the likes of Google and Yahoo!," Flannery says. "Examples like these lend credibility to the market growth we’ve experienced since Factiva Search 2.0’s inception."

The breadth and depth of Factiva searches have changed as well, he continues, with multimedia, visual­ization, alert widget, and newsletter enhancements now available that "not only give users the ability to gather relevant content, but also give them the option to disseminate it."

And although it was originally intended "to enhance the user search experience" for Dow Jones Factiva subscribers (who in 2008 reported a 50% increase in Search 2.0 usage over the previous year), Flannery says the company "now uses the solution across many EMG product lines."

About the Author

Marla Mesek Clark (mimno1@aol.com)is an editor and freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va. Her work has appeared in EContent, EventDV,and EMedia magazines, among other publications.

Despite the abundance of business and academic information on the internet, professionals expecting to find what they need come up short 36% of the time, according to Outsell's latest end user research. Outsell surveyed 5,660 information users from the corporate, education, government, and healthcare sectors in the US and UK about their information spending-their needs, preferences and habits; favored types and formats; and time spent on information tasks. Among results: Fifty seven percent start searches on the internet (down from 79% in 2001), while 25% begin with an intranet (up from 5%); more than 50% use social networks; knowledge workers individual and departmental spending on information is declining, and more senior professionals are making the purchases both reflecting the economic downturn.

(www.outsellinc.com)

Intelligize, Inc., a provider of document technology solutions, announced the launch of Precedent Check, its proprietary search, retrieval, and cataloguing service designed to assist lawyers, bankers, and other corporate finance professionals prepare SEC regulatory filings, including Forms 10-K, 10-Q and S-1. Developed by Wall Street attorneys, Precedent Check’s technology finds the most relevant precedents. It also includes business intelligence tools that analyze SEC filings from multiple companies simultaneously.

(www.intelligize.com)

SDL Tridion, a provider of global Web Content Management (WCM), announced the launch of SDL Tridion 2009, a unified online marketing suite. The platform allows marketers to create and deploy fully integrated marketing campaigns that incorporate customer management and interaction, multi-channel marketing, and web content management. SDL Tridion 2009's taxonomy and content classification capabilities allow web content to be categorized through a tagging system, enabling visitors to view relevant content through a navigation system. The multi-channel marketing capabilities integrate with the suite’s audience management capabilities to ensure content is delivered across all online and offline marketing collateral. Response rates, such as click-throughs, are monitored and this data is automatically used to update the customer intelligence module for future communications.

(www.sdl.com)

Lucid Imagination, a commercial open source company dedicated to supporting Apache Lucene and Solr search technologies, announced a strategic investment from In-Q-Tel (IQT), an independent strategic investment firm that identifies technology solutions to support the mission of the CIA and the broader U.S. Intelligence Community. Through the IQT strategic investment, Lucid Imagination will support the United States Intelligence Community, made up of 18 organizations including the Central Intelligence Agency, by providing advanced access to Lucene and Solr search solutions.

(www.lucidimagination.com, www.iqt.org)

Alacra announced the release of Alacra Pulse Professional, the premium version of its Alacra Pulse platform. Alacra Pulse finds, filters, and packages web-based content so that users can consume information about a company. The Pulse Platform reads and analyzes news stories and blog posts from more than 2,900 mainstream and alternative media RSS feeds searching for specific types of business information. The new Alacra Pulse Professional provides: the ability to create portfolios or watch lists; daily email alerts of the latest events on companies in portfolios; and information sharing.

(www.alacra.com)

For more information on Alacra Pulse, see our earlier article:

http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/News/News-Feature/Alacra-Puts-its-Finger-on-the-Pulse-of-Business-Information-52670.htm

Dialog, a provider of online information services for professional searchers, launched Dialog NewsRoom Plus. Dialog NewsRoom Plus integrates global news content along with information from the open web in a single, desktop source accessible across entire organizations. Since Dialog NewsRoom Plus is open to anyone in an organization, Dialog has included two search forms—easy and advanced. Dialog’s searching extends to video through a technology that allows users to search transcribed audio and images. Results are displayed in a tabular format, allowing users to separate print, video and Web data. Users can choose to link to a summary or the full text of the article, which can be displayed in any number of formats, including HTML, PDF, Microsoft Word, and XML. Dialog NewsRoom Plus offers a desktop option that allows Dialog news content to be used across organizations.

(www.dialog.com)

Nstein Technologies has announced TME 5, the latest version of its text mining engine.

The company reports that new features include Web 3.0 compliance, a variety of linguistic enhancements and a suite of management tools to allow even greater flexibility and control of semantic metadata. Nstein adds that all of the features are designed to provide the most relevant content to enhance the user experience.

TME 5 also supports faceted sentiment analysis, which tells an editor not only if an article is positive or TME 5 will also offer a suite of five administration modules to more easily manage the different components to generating metadata, namely documents, authority files, taxonomies and ontologies.

The release will be available for customers in the Fall. To learn more on TME 5, click here

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Teragram has introduced Sentiment Analysis Manager (SAM) a social media analysis tool that computes the sentiment of digital text and captures relevant information that enables brand managers to see what are writing about their products. The company describes SAM as the first hybrid system that combines both a statistical method for computing reviews as well as a rules-based approach that lets brand managers evaluate specific terms and syntaxes.

SAM automatically computes the review sentiment from mainstream sites and social media outlets, capturing the overall opinion of the combined assessments. SAM also analyzes the number of stars in a product rating to extract the general consumer reaction to that product. It searches and evaluates both positive and negative phrases in reviews for a more detailed breakdown of these online evaluations. Users can extrapolate this information from SAM to create color-coded graphs to understand exactly what these online posts mean in terms of the overall tone of coverage of their brand.

Semanti Corp., a semantic search provider, has announced its new search enhancement tool, which provides users with the ability to help internet users find, retrieve, and share information. Semanti employs a semantic-based search methodology that integrates with Facebook Connect to allow users to search at a social level, and offers new tools for personalized searches. A free browser plug-in, Semanti works with all industry-leading search engines (including Microsoft Bing), so users do not have to change their existing search behaviors.
 
After downloading the free Semanti plug-in, a user invites their social network members to do so as well. Using their preferred search engines like, friends click on links they find relevant to their inquiries. Then when an individual conducts a search based on a specific topic, the friends’ results and recommendations appear at the top of their search engine results marked as being endorsed by their Facebook friends. For example, a user searching for a new restaurant will benefit from seeing which restaurants their Facebook friends have researched and saved.
 
Semanti also includes a MyWeb tool: When users find a page they like, they click on a button to save it so it is easy to find again later. Unlike bookmarks or favorites, MyWeb stores the entire page’s text along with the user’s search terms. Later, when the user is searching for the page again, they can find it using their preferred search engine–Semanti will search the text on the user’s saved pages as well as the search terms originally used to find those pages and then display matching results above the usual search engine results. Because the pages are saved by Semanti, the user can access them from any computer without having to worry about whether or not their bookmarks or favorites are on located on a particular computer.

(www.semanti.com)

MetaVis Technologies, Inc. announced the general availability of MetaVis ARCHITECT and MetaVis CLASSIFIER, software that enhances document search, findability, and eDiscovery. MetaVis products provide taxonomy support and metadata management to SharePoint. MetaVis ARCHITECT for SharePoint allows information architects to develop and maintain SharePoint taxonomies. ARCHITECT visualizes a SharePoint environment through two-dimensional graphical diagrams allowing users to edit diagram elements and provision or synchronize updates to SharePoint. MetaVis CLASSIFIER helps to organize SharePoint content and its metadata. CLASSIFIER capabilities include importing and tagging content with new values and content types; moving or coping content to different folders, lists sites or servers; or doing all simultaneously.

(www.metavistech.com)

ontoprise, a provider of Semantic Web infrastructure technologies, has released Semantic MediaWiki+ 1.4.4. SMW+ is an open-source semantic wiki, aimed at usage in commercial and corporate environments, allowing users to manage and retrieve wiki contents. The overall functions include: Toolbars for tagging wiki contents semantically, an ontology browser, a graphical query interface. Other features include: a WYSIWYG editor, Awareness functions, a data import component, and permission controls.

(http://wiki.ontoprise.com)

Exalead announced a partnership with GWAVA, Novell's collaboration partner.  Exalead's CloudView OEM Edition is now integrated into GWAVA's Retain E-Mail Archiving Platform for a more customizable and lower cost solution. The agreement with GWAVA is an example of the growing traction of Exalead's search-based applications (SBAs) in the e-discovery space, where scalable, secure and customizable search and the ability to quickly find relevant results are key.

(www.exalead.com)

As a part of its fourth-generation e-discovery software, Kazeon Systems has announced the eDiscovery SharePoint Manager for SharePoint Server 2003 and 2007.

Kazeon’s new offering provides forensic collection using SharePoint as both an ESI source and ESI target. The company further says it provides extensive data verification, data auditing and exception-reporting for maximum defensibility of e-discovery for SharePoint sites. The product offers in-depth processing as well as legal hold management, workflow, and enforcement for SharePoint data and metadata, says Kazeon. It adds it provides fine-grained analytics, search and visualization of SharePoint data by different metadata attributes, custodian/users, date ranges and content, thus providing a solution for early case assessments and in-house review.

In addition, Kazeon also offers a unique dynamic concept search for SharePoint data to help investigations and GRC projects get visibility and extract concepts of relevant words and phrases that are in the SharePoint repository.

CLIR, an independent, nonprofit organization whose mission is to expand access to information, has received $28,000 from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to investigate the possible relevance of declassified tools developed by the intelligence community to humanistic scholarship. The project builds on CLIR's recent work in two areas: identifying analytical tools that can be shared among investigators; and exploring the research potential of very large, heterogeneous digital collections. The grant will support a literature search and evaluation of tool findability, a meeting to discuss how scholars might use such tools and how access to the tools could advance humanities scholarship, and publication of results.

(www.clir.org)