Enterprise Search

Market Trends in Embedded Search

Are you trying to find an embedded search solution that meets your users’ needs and your specific application requirements?  Have you tried to embed search into your application, but found it difficult and expensive to customize and integrate? Have you already embedded a solution only to find that it lacks the performance and functionality your customers are demanding? Would you like to learn about how you can cost-effectively give your customers access to search that has been architected for ISVs, offers value-added features, and scales?

View a brief video interview about the webinar with Miles Kehoe.

If so, we’d like to invite you to join our webinar, “12 Leading Insights on Embedded Search for ISVs.” Learn about:
•    Major Market Trends for Embedded Search
•    Key Challenges Facing ISVs with Embedded Search
•    5 Most Important Embedded Search Requirements
•    What Works and What Doesn’t
•    Overview of Exalead CloudView OEM Edition
Moderator
•    Eric Rogge, Senior Director of Marketing, Exalead

Featured Speakers
•    Ranjeet Vidwans, VP of OEM, Exalead
•    Miles Kehoe, President, New Idea Engineering

Date/Time
•    Friday, December 5, 2008 at 11am PST

Registration:
To register for the webinar, please click here.

To download the Exalead whitepaper "The ISV Challenge: Satisfying the Demand for Better Search,” 

Some Good News in Tech Support

With all the complaints about customer service these days, we wanted to give a shout out to FAST Tech Support for a recent set of positive interactions.  Very professional, very patient, and they were able to "track the sun" by reassigning the call to various call centers around the world to continue working the issues beyond local business hours until everything was resolved, real team effort.  Ironically we had attempted to do this back at Verity in the early 1990s, but back then the technology wasn't quite up to it.

Come to think of it, we've also had some good interactions with some other companies' tech support and customer service folks recently, also worth a mention: AT&T (voice line), Verizon (in-store wireless card), GoDaddy, Dell (on-site service), GE (on-site service), Apple (in-store iMac and iPhone), HP (new HP tablet) and Tivo; HP is still working with with us on the new tablet, but they've made some progress and I'd give them an "A" for effort, and to be fair this is a brand new product.  Lest you think we live in some alternate universe, rest assured we've had less pleasant experiences with a few other household names lately, but calling those folks out in public is not our style!

And thinking about this a bit more, some higher level points come to mind:

1: As technology products get more and more complex, all products will have issues; zero problems is not a reasonable expectation when you're living on the crest of a technology wave.  But having a reputable company to call when the tech hits a glitch, and having the option of speaking to an actually being when none of the automated tools can handle it, is what sets these companies apart.  The open community support model can also work, albeit in a different way, if there's a critical mass of people, but not all technologies have this critical mass of energetic expertise.

2: We've noticed that many of the companies we've had good interactions with do conduct customer satisfaction surveys, either on an ongoing bassis, or after a specific tech support or customer service issue.  They seem to actually care about customer service.  To his credit, Bob Bramley had started a similar program back at Verity in the early 90's, which I inherited after he left.

3: Miles tells an anecdote about IBM customer service back in the day, also being content if something minor occasionally went wrong, seeing it as an opportunity for prompt and positive customer interaction, to help solidify customer loyalty.  This is still true today.  I've suggested Dell to many friends and colleagues because of their onsite support options, which do cost extra, but which are well worth it.

Yes, staffing with humans is more expensive then not doing so, but advanced technology really needs it.  And it's fine to try offering automated service as a first line of defense, if it's done well, and if there is clearly an escape hatch to talk to an actual person if the customer wants.  And if you already knew all this, forgive the platitudes.

So again, kudos to FAST, AT&T, Verizon, GoDaddy, HP, Dell, Apple, Tivo and GE for giving customer service a good name.

Call for papers for Enterprise Search Summit East 2008

Michelle Manafy of InfoToday and the Managing Director of E-Content Magazine has sent out a call for speakers for the Enterprise Search Summit in New York City in May 2009. The deadline is coming up November 10, and we've been negligent in getting the request our sooner.

The ESS NY show is always a great event - great speakers, great venue, and a great way to meet and talk shop with hundreds of people who are facing the challenge of making search work. If you have an idea for a presentation, or want to share your success with others, submit your idea electronically before Monday the 10th.

Her note follows:

 - - - - - - - - - -

Call for Speakers

Enterprise Search Summit: Enabling Information Access

[Deadline for Submissions November 10, 2008]

 

We are now accepting proposals to speak at the Enterprise Search Summit East 2009, which will be held May 12-13 in New York. (Pre-conference sessions May 11). Proposals are now being accepted at  http://www.enterprisesearchsummit.com/2009/CallForSpeakers.shtml

The deadline for submitting proposals is November 10, 2008.

 

We seek dynamic speakers who can talk knowledgeably about detailed aspects of how to implement and maximize search within an organization. Search can no longer be viewed as a stand-alone application. It is increasingly part of everything we do and has become the de facto gateway to information in the enterprise. This year’s Summit will examine the ways to leverage search tools, information architecture, classification, and other strategies and technologies to enable information access.

 

Ours is a well-informed, tech-savvy audience, so proposals should be specific and detailed. Consider topic such as:

 

·         Search as the gateway to enterprise information

·         Integrating search into other enterprise systems

·         Customizing your search solution/ Task-specific search

·         Compliance, records management, and eDiscovery with effective search

·         Migrating your search engine

·         Social search and social tagging strategies & solutions

·         Search-enabled decision making

·         Business intelligence, data mining

·         Optimizing your interface

·         Navigational tools—context, facets, entity extraction, clustering, and visualization

·         Emerging trends, the future of search

·         Improving human-computer interaction/ Good interaction design

·         Overcoming information overload

·         Categorization techniques

·         Specific strategies for enhancing an existing solution

 

If you represent a company that has an enterprise search software product, your best bet to be on our program is to collaborate with a customer to submit a case study to be presented by them, following the guidelines above and on the website.

 

Thank you. I look forward to receiving your proposals.

 

Michelle Manafy

Enterprise Search Summit Conference Chair

Editorial Director, Enterprise Group, Information Today, Inc.

michelle.manafy@infotoday.com

Do it now!

Grep is not a search engine

I actually started out to write an entry on the weird search terms we've seen, but that will have to wait. As I was doing some research for that entry, I ran into yet another annoyance we often see: a 'search engine' works just like grep.

For those of you who don't know the pleasures and utility of grep, I feel both regret and envy. After all, I've spent years relying on that bizarre Unix & Linux utility - so much so that I use the MKS Toolkit on all of my Windows PCs. But as useful as grep can be, it is not a search engine.

Consider Adobe Acrobat. I found a PDF on the web, and viewed it with the Adobe Acrobat Version 7.00 add-in for Firefox. I am looking for a phrase popular in the management service consulting business that describes a process: 'as is, to be'. Now, all of these are typically stop words which is the point of my 'weird searches' entry to come.

When you search a PDF file with the built-in Search feature, the built-in engine will return all instances of the sequences of characters you enter. Search for the phrase view and you'll see all of the instances of the term as well as the term views. Cool - stemming! But wait! Dig a bit further and you find it also returns review, interviews viewpoint, and any other terms whose only similarity to the original query is that it contains the same letter sequence. How about a phrase? Adobe doesn't seem to support quoting a phrase; but it seems when you enter multiple space-delimited terms it assumes you want a phrase search. But even in a phrase search, the last term only seems to start with a partial. Thus, a search for switch vendors will find the term; but it will also work if you search for switch v.

This capability can be cool - for example, if you want to find the instant of the string 30/60/90, you can do so. Heck, just type 30/ and you're there. And if you have really weird error numbers or status codes (0x00ffdd07) it works great!

In fairness, Adobe does let you specify whole words only and case-sensitive search. But often we see companies that provide grep-like search in their product or service and eagerly claim 'search included'. I guess companies for whom search is a check-box feature and not really seen as contributing to corporate success will accept such an attitude. 

And by the way - we don't think the SQL LIKE operator counts as a search engine either. But that's a rant for another day.

Reviewing OpenPipeline

OpenPipeline is an initiative proposed by search engine company Dieselpoint to begin development of standards in the enterprise and customer facing search marketplace.

"Current solutions are proprietary and require that search administrators define and manage data source connectors, file filters, text analyzers, taxonomy, and dictionaries for each search engine technology," says Miles Kehoe, CEO of New Idea Engineering. "Defining once and maintaining a single source regardless of how many and which search engine you use is a big win for customers. We hope other search engine vendors will be adopting this strategy soon." 

"Enterprise search is not the same as web searching", Chris Cleveland, CEO of Dieselpoint says, "because it entails all of the nitty-gritty preparation for search—that is, it requires doing all of those things you need to do to get a document and standardize it before indexing. OpenPipeline, he says, aims to streamline the preparation process through its innovative document-processing capabilities."

Additional information ... 2008 Enterprise Search Vendors: The New Fab 4 ... and 1/2. (http://www.ideaeng.com/pub/entsrch/2008/number_01/article01.html)

OpenPipeline was created and by Chris and his team of developers at Dieselpoint, whose intranet and customer-facing search product is written in Pure Java. Dieselpoint Search is a powerful product, and has many of what we call 'Enterprise Search 2.0' capabilities designed in from the start. For example, it has a web-based control panel for business and IT managers, and provides great support for features like dynamic facets, activity reporting, and powerful data crawling capabilities. It has an elegant and clean interface which is extremely scalable. Dieselpoint Search integrates OpenPipeline for crawling, parsing, analyzing, and routing documents.

About Dieselpoint
Founded in 1999, Dieselpoint provides high-performance search, navigation, and discovery/information retrieval software for structured and unstructured data. Every day, Dieselpoint customers search millions of items and terabytes of data. Customers like The Nielsen Company, Northrop Grumman, Porsche, HMV, McGraw-Hill, ITT, Waterstone’s Books, and British Telecom use Dieselpoint software for corporate portals, intranet search, product catalogs, and engineering databases. Dieselpoint has developed industry-leading advances in faceted search and scalability. Coupled with a new Open Pipeline architecture and outstanding ease of implementation, Dieselpoint is the platform of choice for corporate search needs.  Further information can be found online at www.dieselpoint.com.