Google’s stellar financial performance means that the company is thriving in a dicey economic climate. With its gush of money, Google can push into the enterprise without the furrowed brows that others sport.

The economics of Google’s advertising machine are becoming almost predictable. Cash fuels frequent, continuous innovation, often without a discernible pattern. Competitors are used to Google’s announcing new functionalities to both Google Docs and Gmail. Google Docs provides better formatting options with a margin ruler, improved numbering and bullets and more options for image placement.

Spreadsheets now have a formula editing bar, cell auto-complete, drag-and-drop columns and more. Google has also added a new drawings editor to Google Docs, which may make Microsoft’s Visio product manager lose some sleep. Within Google Docs you can build flow charts collaboratively. Gmail now sports a new nested label feature and the ability to drag and drop attachments.

In the larger information processing markets, the Google method was at first disruptive. Five or six years ago, the Google Search Appliance (somewhat confusingly named GSA) was a novelty. In the GSA’s infancy, the "baby" version of the Google search system cost less than $2,500. Today, the price is higher, and the Google cheerleading is another background noise in enterprise search procurement.

Adaptable

Ask an enterprise user about search and the answer is something along the lines of: "I want search to work just like Google." Google will not reveal how many GSAs have been sold. I have heard estimates that range from 20,000 to as many as 60,000 units at client locations. Presumably someone in a cubicle at Google has the "number," but the Google way is inscrutable silence.

Today, search and retrieval is as unstable as wine on a harried waiter’s serving tray. The intersection of an organization’s information needs, a GSA and original code that makes use of Google application programming interfaces is a useful combination in the hands of a savvy IT professional. Google and a small number of other search vendors have adapted to some interesting changes in enterprise information access.

First, in-house information professionals want a combination of easy deployment and a bunch of knobs and dials to turn in order to deliver search-enabled applications. (The GSA offers about four knobs; other vendors offer scores of knobs plus buttons and sliders to set.)

Second, the users expect a search box, which means an actual search box or information that just appears "automagically," preferably without too much mousing around.

Third, even the lawyers and accountants know that  appropriately priced systems information access is essential. Organizations are wading in mud on the shore of a rapidly expanding lake of digital information. A misstep can be expensive, embarrassing or financially burdensome.

In this shift, what has happened to the Google Search Appliance? The answer is that the GSA is now complemented by a wider range of Google components. Each component has search DNA, but those complements add important capabilities to Google’s enterprise search lineup. The analogy is that a basketball team finds itself with two LeBron James.

Let me highlight the Google enterprise search lineup as we wind closer to the end of 2010. Google does not package its products and services as I group them, preferring to scatter information like pieces in a big puzzle.

Progress report

Google has some work to do in making its wealth of products, services and resources more easily findable. In the meantime, buckle down and explore Google. The payoff makes the effort worthwhile in many situations.

The surprising news was the rollout of Google Commerce Search (GCS). Most organizations know that Google can search a Web site without charge or, if there is a fee, it is a bargain. The GCS focuses on the retail side of a company’s business. You can begin your education about this new search service at google.com/commerce search. In a nutshell, for $50,000 a year—a price that varies by number of stocking units or items for sale—you get a cloud-based e-commerce system. Keep in mind that if you own a Google Search Appliance, the systems are separate. The benefits of the product include seamless scaling to handle peak traffic, special product promotion functions, and advanced reporting and analysis, among others. Endeca’s e-commerce system has been a strong contender in the enterprise retail search space. Like Google’s industrial strength e-mail service, built on Gmail and the Postini systems, GCS is a cloud play.

The second key development has been Google’s steady stream of integration and application programming interface (API) activity. An API is a method used by one program to allow it to communicate with another program. On the integration front, Google continues to add partners. With each passing month, it calibrates its partner program. From the relatively loose approach taken a year ago, today’s partner program is stringent. Among the partners available to assist organizations are Appirio, Atlassian and Manymoon. A full lineup of partners is available at http://code.google.com/googleapps/campfire.html.

The APIs themselves now number in the hundreds, but I have not been able to locate a comprehensive list. For the enterprise sector, there is a secure data connector, a provisioning API, a code block to implement a single sign-on and an e-mail migration API. There are three ways to keep track of Google’s APIs. I have signed up for the Google Apps Developer Blog, which often yields some tasty code McNuggets. Next, I track postings and content in Google Apps at this URL, http://code.google.com. Google posts some useful information on YouTube at youtube.com/user/googledevelopers.

Toward the future

After entering API in the search box, I click across the tabs at the top of the page; for example, Google Code Web site and Google Code Groups. Third, I navigate to Google’s official YouTube channel at youtube.com/user/google, and I run a query for enterprise and then a separate query for APIs. The new videos are easy to spot. In the last six months, Google has done an arguably better job disseminating information via its YouTube channel than in its blogs and “official” documentation.

Third, Google’s enterprise application “marketplace” continues to grow. If you have not visited that outlet, go to Google.com and enter the query Google Apps Marketplace in the search box. The first link is to the store. You can take a quick look at the products, which include a number of categories. I start with the entries for “enterprise search” and do some clicking and scanning. What is surprising is that Google has yet to provide a seamless, integrated way to locate useful information about its enterprise services.

What is in the future? My 2007 study, Google Version 2.0, described the method by which Google can deliver most if not all of the GSA’s functions via the cloud. My view is that by the end of 2010, an enterprise will be able to “hook” together various functions, including some of the third-party indexing features of the GSA with Google’s cloud services. Full integration and a 100 percent cloud solution lies in the future. But more integration seems highly likely.

Instead of integrating Microsoft Exchange content with business intelligence data from Cognos (acquired by IBM), to name two supported third-party systems, an enterprise will have more integration options that essentially “snap in.” Until Google productizes those code components, an authorized Google integrator like Adhere Solutions (adheresolutions.com) can mesh various Google components today.

The challenge Google poses to competitors and prospects is the speed with which it moves. After 11 successful years, Google delights in making customers crack the Google code. The company has some work to do in making its wealth of products, services and resources more easily findable. In the meantime,  buckle down and explore Google. The payoff makes the effort worthwhile in many situations.

And Google’s mid-year grade? B+ and improving.  

Vivisimo now offers the Information Optimization Assessment, a professional services offering designed to chart a roadmap for how an organization can maximize and align its existing information assets with its strategic goals. By following the roadmap, organizations will be able to gain greater leverage from existing information resources, resulting in improved ability to reach strategic goals, the company claims.

Vivisimo reports the new service was born out of the best practices and insight gained by Vivisimo consultants during the successful adoption of its award-winning Velocity Platform into numerous Fortune 500 companies and government agencies over the past 10 years.

During the Information Optimization Assessment, Vivisimo leads a information exchange with key stake holders representing business and IT, and works to identify information challenges and opportunities that affect overall business goals. The team then analyzes existing information processes and creates a strategic roadmap to help guide companies toward their desired information state.

Sized to address the most pressing enterprise needs, Vivisimo’s Information Optimization Assessment typically takes three weeks or less to complete. As a result of the assessment, Vivisimo says, organizations will be equipped with a roadmap to accomplish the following business benefits:

• improved knowledge discovery, retention and application;
• increased market visibility, responsiveness;
• greater leverage from existing investments and resources; and
• improved information governance and compliance to reduce risk.

Coveo has unveiled Coveo Expresso 2.0 Beta, its free, entry-level search solution. Expresso offers enterprise-class, advanced information access for small and medium-sized businesses or corporate departments for up to 50 users, 1 million e-mail items and 100,000 documents.

The company reports the new offering is easily expandable to accommodate a larger number of users, at a price point claimed to be significantly lower than any other enterprise search platforms on the market, including appliances, and with superior functionality.

Coveo Expresso now includes expanded access to enterprise information including desktop content, SharePoint files and file shares through the Coveo Outlook Sidebar, enabling users to search across enterprise systems without leaving Outlook and to “search where they work.” The Coveo Outlook Sidebar also includes conversation folding, related conversations, related people and related attachments, as well as faceted search.

Since its launch two and a half years ago, Attivio has been singularly focused on enabling unified access to structured and unstructured information. With Attivio's Active Intelligence Engine (AIE), users retrieve and analyze all types of content and data with simple, search-style queries. New features in AIE Version 2.1 include SQL support (via a JDBC driver), key phrase detection, content spotlighting, entity-level sentiment analysis and integrated connector support for active security. With the release of AIE 2.1, Attivio also provides a platform for building applications, such as dashboards, which provide a comprehensive view across documents, Web sites, e-mails and more, as well as data that has traditionally been limited to database applications.

Last year, Attivio announced a beta program to test its new AIE SQL module that would let customers write and execute SQL queries against AIE directly or from existing enterprise BI tools and applications. The company has since completed the beta with two customers, and AIE 2.1 now includes this full SQL support.

"With the latest version of AIE, we have accomplished some significant milestones. Support for AI-SQL via JDBC delivers the precision of SQL with the fuzziness of search, using a language that is entirely familiar to virtually all developers. At the same time, key phrasing helps to disambiguate an entity based on statistical improbabilities, while our sentiment analysis capabilities can see beyond seemingly positive content to get to the underlying cause of negativity," says Sid Probstein, CTO, Attivio. "These features are not available in legacy enterprise search, data management or business intelligence technologies. AIE brings the best of these solutions into a single UIA platform."

"For information access to work well, it needs strong technical features that support searching, browsing, analysis and decision making," says Sue Feldman, IDC’s VP for search and discovery technologies. "Capabilities like SQL support, key phrase detection and entity-level sentiment analysis are important innovations that provide a deeper level of detection and analysis than have traditionally been available through enterprise search and business intelligence applications. They deepen the understanding of the information to make results more pertinent, and to provide analysis and reporting on top of good information access."

Nick Patience, research director for information management at The 451 Group, says the 2.1 versioning implies that this is evolutionary, not revolutionary. But, he says that of companies offering search-based applications, Attivio is making the best progress and is winning customers at a steady rate. He is impressed with the features included in this version, in particular the support for SQL, key phrase detection and entity-level sentiment analysis.

Probstein says the company constantly works to refine what AIE offers, rather than just roll out new features. For example, AIE has provided entity extraction and sentiment analysis in earlier versions, but now it has entity-level sentiment analysis, which provides a greater depth of insight. Each version of AIE has further enhanced the available security features. The company also plans for additional enhancements to its SQL support, such as sub-queries and case sensitivity. He also showed me several examples of an "active dashboard," which provide a desktop visualization for a specific work environment, such as a sales manager. At this time, Attivio delivers these to customers as specially built professional services applications. But, Probstein says that later this year the company will offer several dashboard modules that can be customized and deployed by customers.

Advance Micro Devices (AMD) recently chose AIE to address a variety of information management initiatives. The initial deployment of AIE is being used to enhance the search capabilities of AMD's public Web site and help manage global Web promotions, including the ability to prioritize query results based on specific campaigns.

"We needed a new approach to information access that extended beyond traditional search capabilities," says Gregg Hansen, VP of applications, AMD. "The relational nature of Attivio's Active Intelligence Engine gives us the ability to formulate queries that understand associations between various content objects to help render results with better relevancy, and also provides the tailored functionality we needed. AIE pulls content from multiple information repositories including our knowledgebase, databases and product catalogs to provide more complete information in response to our users' requests, and helps us better target promotional campaigns."

While the company is pleased at what AIE offered for its Web project (in response to an RFP)--including replacing the two search engines it had been using--it is most excited about the potential AIE offers for connections with AMD's data warehouse, including correlating and reporting. "AIE represents a good jump forward for us," says Hansen.

—Paula J. Hane

Dassault Systèmes, a provider of 3D and product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions, has acquired Exalead, a Paris-based provider of search platforms and search-based applications (SBA) for consumer and business users, for approximately $165 million.

Exalead reports some 100 million people rely on its solution for information search, access and reporting. It further claims to have the industry's only platform designed from the ground up to apply advanced semantic processing to Web-scale data volumes and usage.

Says Exalead CEO Alain Cotte, "This alliance represents a tremendous opportunity for our partners and customers who will benefit from Dassault Systèmes' global presence." Exalead co-founder François Bourdoncle adds, "With our real-time search and natural language capabilities, Exalead provides a unique Web user experience. The combination with 3D represents the next generation of information technology for life-like experiences. With Dassault Systèmes, the number of people who will benefit from our technology will explode."

Ektron has released eIntranet, a complete solution for intranets that integrates elements of Ektron's core technology and gives businesses a powerful and trusted intranet solution. The company says eIntranet combines social software and Web content management (WCM) in one enterprise application, and the familiar interface and Ektron's robust WCM functionality raises the daily value of the intranet for businesses. Activity streams, a gallery of widgets, mobile engagement and in-context analytic tools ensure that eIntranet is easy to deploy, use and extend—either on-premise, hosted or in the cloud.

Ektron reports the major 10 new features include:

Activity streams and timeline navigation. The most useful information finds the employees who need it most. Like ratings, status and activity updates on social networking sites, eIntranet gives employees a real-time picture of what's happening in a company at the moment and what information has been the most effective for their peers.

Collaboration. Using personal profiles, groupspaces, forums, blogs, calendars and wikis, internal teams can collaborate on documents before sharing them with the entire organization. eIntranet ensures that everyone is informed instantly of status updates and has access to the most recent versions of documents.

Micro-messaging. Notification and filtering engines provide only relevant information.

Mobile engagement. Critical information is delivered to employees via SMS alerts, e-mail or the eIntranet Mobile App anywhere, anytime.

Analytics. The Ektron Open Analytics provider gives in-context information about eIntranet usage and adoption by tracking activity, trends and popular areas.

Findability. Its search and tag clouds are built on search and navigation best practices. Taxonomy enhances how information and documents are organized, going beyond folder structure to make collateral more findable.

Widget-based functionality. IT departments can use Ektron's customizable widgets to integrate with business-critical systems. The widgets also extend the functionality of eIntranet. Developers and marketers can create their own widgets or download the latest widgets from the Ektron Exchange. Drag-and-drop widgets may be added or removed based on preference or advanced technical intranet demands.

Combination of social software and WCM. Social software by itself does not make an effective intranet; they require a content management platform to provide the workflow, document and content management and organization capabilities that are essential to productive and secure collaboration.

Integration. The eIntranet can become a portal for other enterprise applications such as Sharepoint, CRM, HR and ERP systems.

Easy to deploy, customize and extend. eIntranet gives authors the power to create, edit and manage web and document content without technical resources.

Deep Web Technologies released details about its multilingual translation capability using its federated search application. WorldWideScience.org, the international science portal, is the first application to be deployed with the technology. Multilingual federated search translates a user's search query into the native languages of the collections being searched, aggregates and ranks these results according to relevance, and translates result titles and snippets back to the user's original language.

Powered by Microsoft, the translation helps users search collections in multiple languages from a single search box in the user's native language. The multilingual translation capability augments the company's Explorit Research Accelerator federated search engine, allowing users to search multiple collections from different countries and languages simultaneously. This release of multilingual Explorit provides for searches of collections in English, Spanish, German, French, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Chinese.

(www.deepwebtech.com)

Altus, a developer of enterprise video search solutions, announced the release of vSearch Mobile, a SaaS video solution that lets users store, manage, and create searchable rich media from virtually any source. The app is designed for mobile devices such as the iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, and Android-based handsets, and was engineered to help companies organize and share knowledge.

With vSearch, an organization can rapidly build a cloud-based knowledge portal that can serve as a centralized site for corporate presentations and rich media content. It also provides access to that information from the popular mobile devices that corporate users rely on in distributed, telecommuting or other mobile work environments. The app is also optimized for use on the larger screens of tablet-based devices such as the iPad.

(www.altuslearning.com)

Version 2.0 of Cambridge Semantics' Anzo platform is now available. Anzo 2.0 is a semantic technology application development suite designed to help businesses discover, integrate, analyze, and report on information contained within the enterprise without reliance on IT. Anzo 2.0 offers new accessibility, reporting, and storage features.

(www.cambridgesemantics.com)

Lijit Networks, a provider of search and discovery tools for online publishers, announced it has closed a $6,000,000 financing round led by Foundry Group. Also participating were Boulder Ventures and Colorado Fund I, managed by High Country Venture. The new investment brings the total venture capital investment in the company since its launch in 2006 to $17,000,000.

Lijit also announced that is has expanded its publisher network to include 12,000 publishers, with 700 million page views and 53 million unique visitors per month. The company indicated that the new financing will be used to continue expanding its publisher network and continue development of its recently launched Advertising Services Platform.

(www.lijit.com)

SAS, a provider of business analytics software and services, has acquired Memex, which offers intelligence management solutions that help improve intelligence processes, enhance public safety, and prevent and deter crime, terrorism, and other threats. SAS reports that it intends to grow the business globally under the existing executive management team. Both SAS and Memex are privately held. Financial terms of the acquisition are not available.

(www.sas.com, www.memex.com)

A law firm in the United Kingdom is using a search-powered solution to eliminate the hazard of conflicts of interest. Davies Arnold Cooper chose Recommind’s MindServer Search platform to search all key business applications firmwide—including document, practice and case management systems and databases—to find potential conflicts.

David Hamilton, IT director at the law firm, says, "Davies Arnold Cooper, in response to new Solicitor rules regarding conflicts, redesigned its conflict checking procedures around MindServer Search. All relevant information can be checked instantly, thus allowing partners to proceed with confidence. The key requirement of any conflicts system is to be able to quickly and reliably search a range of data sources and given the capabilities of the solution, which is used widely throughout the practice on a daily basis, it made sense to use it for our conflicts of interest checking solution."

To lessen the risk of conflicts of interest, Recommind says it developed a comprehensive conflicts workflow solution powered by MindServer Search. Now with the system, Davies Arnold Cooper lawyers can immediately verify if a potential conflict exists, according Recommind.

Simon Price, European director at Recommind, says, "No longer do the firm’s lawyers have to rely on individuals responding to e-mails when checking conflicts of interest, nor do they have to interrupt their day-to-day work to find the answers they need. They can now access the full breadth of the firm’s information assets right from their own desktops."

The growing volume of Web 2.0 information causes search engines to rethink their outdated popularity-ranking algorithms by bringing timely social media content to the foreground in an attempt to increase relevance for users. In the recent FaceBook privacy controversy, Web users made it clear that they are not so eager to allow search engines to mine their communities’ content for the benefit of search engine companies and other third parties. As a result, many believe social media content is not rescuing search engine companies’ quest for intimate relevance.

To that end, Darwin Ecosystem has unveiled its Awareness Engine. The technology applies chaos theory principles to reveal emerging patterns and correlations that accelerate the user’s understanding of what is happening about a given theme of interest regardless of popularity ranking.

Darwin Ecosystem believes this organic and self-organizing model is best adapted to the evolution of today’s Web when compared with the increasing limitation of page ranking offered by search engines. Although not a replacement for search engines, Darwin’s Awareness Engine highlights a new and missing perspective. The Darwin interface provides an intuitive, interactive ScanCloud (patent pending) that reveals correlated themes for contextual content filtering around users’ topics of interest, a BuzzTape that displays themes that have high content acceleration within the last 24 hours, and the ability to save attractors (a term used in chaos theory) to monitor the evolution of favorite topics. Darwin's Awareness Engine can be viewed in action here.

Company founder and CEO Thierry Hubert feels that Darwin’s Awareness Engine will power a new model of information consumption that will benefit Web and enterprise users alike while allowing Web 2.0 authors to be noticed in a timely and relevant context. Darwin Ecosystem’s product roadmap extends beyond its Web Awareness Engine as Darwin intends to empower its user community. Its solutions and API are designed to allow meaningful discovery to be accessible, useable and beneficial to users seeking to favor the voice and movement of the Web, instead of being subjected to sites that determine what matters according to popularity.

OCLC is offering a new service where users can find information on WorldCat via Twitter. In order to access the service, #Ask4Stuff, a user inputs the hashtag into a Twitter message with keywords to be searched. The user would then get a response with a link to a WorldCat search result. #Ask4Stuff allows users to search WorldCat from mobile devices connected to Twitter and to find results from a familiar interface.

(www.oclc.org)