EContent magazine editor Michelle Manafy discusses strategies and tactics for organizations searching for an Enterprise Search Solution with Martin White, managing director of Intranet Focus Ltd. and author of MakingSearch Work: Implementing Web, Intranet and EnterpriseSearch.

 
While search tools have become the de facto entry point to the web for almost every person with an internet connection, effective search behind the firewall is far from a given. Organizations must consider not only the technologies offered, but must closely examine the indivudals who will use the tools and how they will be using them. White offers insights that will work for companies large and small, which he has gleaned from decades of work consulting on the design and management of intranets and extranets, and the deployment of enterprise information portals.

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PHOTO:  Michelle Manafy and Martin White at Buying & Selling EContent 2007. Photo by Mark Goldstein.

This important book is designed to help organizations understand, evaluate, and implement desktop, Web site, intranet, and enterprisesearch applications. Information guru Martin White explains search technology in clear, non-technical language and describes the benefits and issues for a range of solutions—from high-end to affordable plug-and-play software products.

In addition to providing critical guidance for anyone charged with implementing an organization’s internal search strategy, the book features a glossary, suggestions for further reading, and an annotated listing of 40 firms providing Web, intranet, and enterprise search solutions.

Coverage includes:

• How search works
• The search business
• Making a business case for search
• Evaluating and selecting a search engine
• Optimizing search performance
• Search usability
• Desktop search
• Implementing Web search
• Implementing intranet search
• Enterprise search
• Multilingual search
• Future directions for search

Whether you are an enterprise knowledge manager, information professional, Web site owner, e-commerce director, or anyone responsible for implementing your organization’s internal search strategy, this book will give you essential guidance not available from any other source.

“Making Search Work tells you in no uncertain terms how to evaluate, buy, and implement enterprise search products. Use it as a handbook throughout your process to get the most value out of search.”

— Bob Boiko, author, Laughing at the CIO
and Content Management Bible

2007/200 pp/hardbound
ISBN 978-1-57387-305-5
Regular Price (North America): $69.50

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Note: The North American edition of Making Search Work is published by Information Today, Inc. in cooperation with Facet Publishing (London). To order the book outside North America visit www.facetpublishing.co.uk.

Clarabridge, a text analysis software company, has introduced its Content Mining Service (CMS), a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering of commercialized text mining. In addition to being able to purchase and internally deploy Clarabridge's Content Mining Platform (CMP), enterprise customers can gain the same business benefits by using CMS, Clarabridge's hosted service via the internet, on a subscription basis. By either method, text mining with Clarabridge is designed to enable a company to convert internal and external textual information such as survey verbatims, online product reviews, or call-center transcripts into actionable business intelligence. The text analytics made possible by either subscribing to CMS or deploying CMP are designed to enable a company to identify trends, root causes of problems, and opportunities for improvement.

(www.clarabridge.com)  

Recommind, well known for enterprise search and automated categorization systems for law firms and enterprises, has released Decisiv Email, new software to address compliance, e-discovery and records management requirements. The product employs categorization and conceptual search technology to automatically tag, organize and file e-mail messages and associated attachments with virtually no user involvement, says Recommind.

Further, the company claims, by allowing only business records to be stored through the use of a single-instance storage infrastructure, Decisiv Email delivers up to 500 percent in storage savings over traditional e-mail archiving systems, while substantially reducing litigation and discovery risk.

Decisiv Email facilitates collaboration within an organization by accurately correlating e-mail-based information with related information in e-mail archives, content management systems, document management systems, records management systems and myriad other information repositories. And by automatically organizing and filing information as it enters and leaves the e-mail system, the solution significantly reduces time spent sorting through e-mail correspondence in search of specific data.

Among the many Decisiv Email features are:

• Microsoft Office integration--all functions are seamlessly accessible from Microsoft Outlook;
• automated tagging and filing of incoming and outgoing messages quickly organizes e-mail-based information, thereby addressing compliance, e-discovery, records management and information life cycle concerns;
• semi- or fully automatic modes of operation;
• a virtually invisible filing system suggests where to file, prompts the sender to file and/or informs users if and where an e-mail has been filed;
• support for multiple formats including Microsoft Office formats, scanned documents, voicemails, etc.;
• asynchronous operation--user does not need to wait for an item to be profiled; and
• integrated project management functions such as roles, project templating and activity reporting.

suchen.de, a German local search engine, has extended its offerings by moving into mobile search with the help of IT2media and mobilePeople. With the current mobile search trial suchen.de will be available on the move using a downloadable mobile search client. The mobile search is designed to allow users to find specific content including yellow and white pages, the mobile internet, local news, and weather information. Search results are displayed on an interactive map, can be saved to the mobile phone's address book, and sent to a friend. Predictive text functionality is intended to allow users to enter search terms by selecting from a list which also includes previously used search terms. The full version is planned to be available to mobile users later this year.

(www.mobilepeople.com; www.it2media.de)  

ClipBlast!, a web video search and navigation platform, has unveiled an enhanced version of its video search toolbar, with a “Real-Time Ticker” that highlights video as it is released across the web. Any website or blog can embed the free video search bar. ClipBlast!’s Real-Time Ticker is a scrolling electronic display that highlights just-uploaded video, giving viewers a glimpse of what’s new and being released on the video web. ClipBlast! continuously indexes the web for video content, and has indexed thousands of content providers. Webmasters and bloggers can embed the new search bar by cutting and pasting a few lines of HTML code into any web page or blog. The code is available at the ClipBlast! website, by clicking “Add Search Bar” from the “Cool Tools” section of ClipBlast!’s home page.

(www.clipblast.com)  

The Knowledge Workers Marketplace operates with Tacilent's knowledge management and analytics kernel (eKM), which is said to help companies and their personnel transform information into reusable knowledge solutions. These reusable offerings are distributed via a secure Web portal, allowing users to work together in a single collaborative environment and maintain their information and business process intelligence in a central, fully searchable repository.

Access to the Web-enabled application is granted based on a user’s role within an organization, allowing for several permission levels within a project or program initiative, says Tacilent. This role-based access provides multiple levels of security and lets project members respond to and perform evaluations online at their convenience, the company says, which further claims all responses and evaluations are consolidated and reconciled automatically, providing the real-time reporting necessary to perform complex analytics.

Exalead has announced a new video search application for its Exalead one:search platform, which gives its users access to millions of video clips indexed from popular online video portals, including YouTube, Dailymotion, Metacare, Vodeo, Kewego and IFILM Web sites. Exalead integrates various categories, such as sports, music, film and entertainment, across multiple platforms, so users can uniformly search for any given item in any category in only one click.

The company's Search by Serendipity navigation system enables a quick narrowing or broadening of a search by clicking on an automatically generated list of related terms or by choosing to search within results by a more specific keyword. For instance, Exalead explains, all videos are indexed using classification information including author, title, date, description, duration, tags and categories, which allows users to sort results by relevance, ratings or number and frequency of views. Other features include searching by length, source and/or keyword.

Exalead adds that each search result listing includes a thumbnail image of the video, title, summary description and details such as author, duration, upload date and a viewer score represented by stars. Placing a cursor over the stars reveals more details about the score, while selecting the detailed view provides instant access to related videos by associated tags and categories.

Meredith Corporation, a media and marketing company, has acquired Healia, a consumer health search engine specializing in finding personalized health information online. Terms were not disclosed. The Jordan, Edmiston Group, Inc., a New York-based investment banking firm that specializes in media and information, represented Healia in this transaction and acted as its exclusive financial advisor. Through its proprietary, patent-pending content filtering technology, Healia serves as a gateway to health information and can help consumers find more refined and responsive answers to health and wellness-related questions. Healia’s technology will be integrated into Meredith’s existing websites. In addition, Meredith and Healia will expand the functionality of Healia.com and will offer the technology through licensing and distribution agreements with select health organizations, consumer websites, employers, and other partners.

(www.meredith.com; www.healia.com; www.jegi.com)  

Vivísimo, a provider of search software, has announced that its web search site, Clusty.com, has been optimized for mobile devices. Clusty Mobile offers navigational capabilities and featured sources of common searches performed by mobile users. Clusty's search technology organizes search results by relevant topics and categories. Additionally, Clusty Mobile optimizes all websites clicked on for mobile viewing, automatically turning web pages into streamlined text versions that can be more clearly read on the small screen. Clusty Mobile offers a new navigational interface that includes a list of topics, or clusters, at the top of the search results page that are related to the user's search query. Users are also aided by spelling suggestions for mistyped or misspelled queries. At the bottom of the search results page, Clusty Mobile suggests related queries to help users narrow their result set.

(http://m.clusty.com; www.vivisimo.com)