The formation of an alliance bringing together non-profits, library groups, corporations, Special Libraries Association (SLA) and other consumer groups to call for a detailed investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice into the Google Books Settlement has been announced. The alliance anticipates an official launch in the coming weeks, at which point additional information will be released to the media about the member organizations, the intent of the alliance's activities, as well as the type of actions the group will be pursue, including specific details as to its intended course of action with the DOJ. SLA has also announced the formation of a new professional interest division that will focus on issues related to planning, creating, maintaining, and using taxonomies, thesauri, ontologies, authority files, and other controlled vocabularies and information structures. The Taxonomy Division of SLA will provide information professionals interested in these topics a professional home-base within SLA, learning opportunities, and access to a global network of colleagues. The Taxonomy Division will focus its professional development and networking activities around strategies to organize and structure information so that content is accessible and useful.

(www.sla.org)

Nexidia, Inc., a provider of audio search and review software, announced that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has purchased multiple licenses of Nexidia's AudioFinder software. The FTC will use Nexidia AudioFinder for reviewing audio content produced in its investigations of a variety of commercial activities.

(www.nexidia.com)

FTI Consulting has unveiled Ringtail QuickCull, a new pre-configured hardware and software package for e-discovery. Citing rapid deployment and out-of-the-box functionality, FTI Technology says QuickCull enables corporations to cull and analyze data on-premise prior to review by outside counsel, providing earlier insight into data and dramatic e-discovery cost reduction.

Upon installation, users can immediately begin indexing data and quickly identify duplicate files, which are automatically tagged for efficiency, says the company. Hidden files and columns, tracked changes and other modifications are also available to view. Reviewers can search for documents using a variety of search methods, including keywords and complex Boolean queries that can also be restricted to specific metadata fields. QuickCull then presents documents for preview, allowing reviewers to mark and tag individual documents in preview mode. Those markings are saved for export into processing, review and analysis tools via the EDRM XML standard, an industry standard for which FTI took a leadership position to develop. QuickCull is also Unicode-compliant to support international requirements.

Yahoo! has revealed new versions of its Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger programs and is testing a new Yahoo! Search results page. By overhauling three of its biggest services, Yahoo! aims to insert itself into the center of most people's online lives. Yahoo! Mail will now feature a more streamlined design, a 25MB attachment limit (up from 10), drag-and-drop photo sharing, social networking features, and a host of new apps from sites like Flickr and PayPal. Yahoo! has also released an on-the-go version for mobile phones.

Yahoo! Messenger's new bells and whistles include a redesigned and more customizable Yahoo! Insider, an updates tab, a language selector that offers 16 different options within the single version, and a video chat option. The new Messenger also has an eye toward mobile functionality with a new iPhone app.

Finally, the remade Yahoo! Search features intelligent search results, new filtering options, and easier access to security controls, and the expansion of Yahoo!'s query suggestion program, Search Assist.

(www.yahoo.com)

Open source support company Lucid Imagination has introduced LucidGaze for Lucene, a monitoring program aimed at operators of open source Apache Lucene and Solr search technologies, which has traditionally been Lucid's target market. LucidGaze will operate with the Java Lucene search library and reverse-engineer characteristics of the Lucene application and provide a framework for developers to retrieve detailed data and statistics to improve application management. LucidGaze works through several statistics aggregators, or monitors, that aggregate information about different key aspects of Lucene search operations. This version supports five such monitors:

• Analysis Monitor for information about the different analyzers and filters used to create the index
• Document Monitor for information on documents and fields added to or retrieved from a Lucene index.
• Index Monitor for statistics on buffers, memory usage, Lucene index readers/writers and add/commit times.
• Search Monitor for information about search cycle times.
• Store Monitor provides number of directory instances.

(www.lucidimaginiation.com)

Text analytics provider Clarabridge has released version 3.3 of its Content Mining Platform (CMP), a service that counts among its clients Best Buy, Capitol One, and H&R Block, among others.
CMP 3.3 will, like previous versions, be used to capture, transform, and analyze free-form customer feedback from social media, CRM systems, and customer feedback systems. The new incarnation of the program boasts text mining and processing speeds seven times faster than previous versions while decreasing storage requirements by 50 percent for customers who are routinely managing more than a terabyte of data.

Clarabridge 3.3 Navigator now provides embedded reports that can be run directly from within the Navigator interface and do not require use of a third party business intelligence application, allowing 10 million-plus document data sets to be run in a matter of seconds.

The data, once compiled, can now be sorted by a variety of methods, including linguistic, Boolean, and statistical factors, and can now be analyzed automatically.

Users will also find that CMP 3.3 supports most common business software.

(www.clarabridge.com)

With an eye on expanding its global network, TheBrain Technologies has expanded its Affiliate Program and Reseller Network to reach new partners on five continents. The new partners, which include SHI, Creation Engine, Mindsystems Pty Ltd Australia, Dynamic Logistics Systems GmbH Germany, Boss Japan Co. Ltd. Japan, Olympic Limited, and Draughtmark Limited, will now be able t o market and resell TheBrain's PersonalBrain data visualization product line.

(www.thebrain.com)

Information Today, Inc., has announced the acquisition of a new conference, The Search Engine Meeting, which was previously operated by Infonortics Ltd of Tetbury, U.K. The conference has been held annually each of the past 14 years, generally in April, in a variety of locations and attracts attendees interested in the development of search engines and organizational search technology. The last several Search Engine Meetings have been held in Boston, and plans for the 2010 date and venue will be forthcoming.

(www.infotoday.com, www.infonortics.com)

Search company OneRiot has brought in $7 million in a Series C funding round led by Appian Ventures, Commonwealth Capital Ventures, and Spark Capital, the company's existing venture capital firms. The company plans to use the money to enhance its search program and keep up with its expanding network of partners.

OneRiot provides real-time internet search results, both through OneRiot.com and through third-party users of the OneRiot search application programming interface. The aforementioned search program runs on an algorithm called PulseRank, a page ranking program that reflects the current social buzz associated with any content on the web through social networking services like Twitter and Facebook, as well as through the input of more than 3 million users who have opted to share information with the service.

(www.oneriot.com)