Enterprise Search

Webinar: What users want from enterprise search in 2012

If you ask the average enterprise user what he or she wants from their internal search platform, chances are good that they will tell you they want search 'just like Google'. After all, people are born with the ability to use Google; why should they need to learn how to use their internal search?

The problem is that web search works so well because, at the sheer scale of the internet, search can take advantage of methodologies that are not directly applicable to the intranet. Yet many of the things that make the public web experience so good can, in fact, be adapted in the enterprise. Our opinion is that, beyond a base level, the success of any enterprise search platform depends on how it is implemented and managed rather than on the core technology.

In this webinar we'll talk about what users want, and how you can address the specific challenges of enterprise content and still deliver a satisfying and successful enterprise search experience inside the firewall.

Register today for our first webinar of the new year scheduled for January 25 : What enterprise users want from search in 2012.

 

 

 

 

 

 

ISYS filters to be used for SAP Platforms

ISYS announced today that SAP has selected the popular ISYS Document Filters to replace software from both Autonomy and Oracle in their popular suite of analytical products.

ISYS, which has marketed an enterprise search product successfully for years, recognized the need for high-capability and low cost document filters, and packaged their internally developed technology. Because of its capabilities, support and price, ISYS Document Filters have become the best choice for companies that need to extract content from hundreds of different formats.

We particularly like that the ISYS filters are lightweight, easy to implement, and priced such that any company can afford to use them in-house or bundled with product. For large companies that use  Lucene/Solr for search but insist on having supported up-to-date filtering technology can solve the problem at a competitive price with ISYS.

 

 

Odd Google Translate Encoding issue with Japanese

Was translating a comment in the Japanese SEN tokenization library.

It seems like if your text includes the Unicode right arrow character, Google somehow gets confused about the encoding.  Saw this on both Firefox and Safari.  Not a big deal, strangely comforting to see even the big guys trip up on character encodings.

OK: サセン
OK: チャセ
Not OK: サセン→チャセ?

10 Handy Things to Know about the Lucene / Solr Source Code

It's funny how certain facts are "obvious" to some folks, stuff they've known a long time, but come as a pleasant surprise to others.  Chances are you know at least half of these, but no harm in double checking!

1. Although Lucene and Solr are available in binary form, most serious users are eventually going to need some custom code.  If you post questions on the mailing lists, I think the assumption is you're comfortable with compilers, source code control and patches.  So it's a good habit to get into early on.
2. Lucene and Solr source code were combined a while back (circa March 2010), so it's now one convenient checkout.
3. You'll want to be using Java 6 JDK to work with recent versions of Lucene / Solr.
4. Lucene/Solr use the ant build tool by default.  BUT did you know that the build file can also generate Project files for Eclipse, IntelliJ and Maven.  So you can use your favorite tool.  (See the README.txt file for info and links)
5. Lucene/Solr use the Subversion / SVN source code control system.  There are clients for Windows and plugins for Eclipse and IntelliJ. (Mac OS X has it built in)
6. You're allowed to do read-only checkout without needing any sort of login - checkouts are completely open to the public.  This is news to folks who've used older or more secure systems.
7. Although checking any changes back in would require a login, it's more common to post patches to the bug tracking system or mailing list, and then let the main committers review and checkin the patch.  Even the read-only checkouts create enough information on your machine to generate patches from your local changes.
8. Doing a checkout, either public or with a login, does not "lock" anything.  This is also a surprise to folks used to older systems.  This non-locking checkout is why anonymous users can be allowed to checkout code - there's no need to coordinate checkouts.
9. The read-only current source for the combined Lucene + Solr is at http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/lucene/dev/trunk  Even though it's an http link, and can be browsed with a web browser, it's also a valid Subversion URL.
10. The "contribute" wiki pages for Lucene and Solr have more info about the source code and patch process.

Solr Disk and Memory Size Estimator (Excel worksheet)

If you do a standard checkout of the Lucene/Solr codebbase you also get a dev-tools directory.  One interesting tidbit in there is an Excel spreadsheet for estimating the RAM and disk requirements for a given set of data.  Be sure to notice the tabs along the bottom, tab 2 is for memory/RAM estimates, and tab 3 is for disk space.

Full URL: http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/lucene/dev/trunk/dev-tools/size-estimator-lucene-solr.xls

Are you spending too much on enterprise search?

If your organization uses enterprise search, or if you are in the market for a new search platform, you may want to attend our webinar next week "Are you spending too much for search?". The one hour session will address:

• What do users expect?
• Why not just use Google?
• How much search do you need?
• Is an RFI a waste of time?   

Date: Wednesday, November 16 2011

Time: 11AM Pacific Standard Time / 1900 UTC

Register today!

Pingar and New Idea Engineering Partnership

I'm happy to announce that our company, New Idea Engineering, has announced a partnership with Pingar, a New Zealand-based company that provides tools to extend and enhance the capabilities of enterprise search. New Idea Engineering is Pingar's first North American reseller.

Pingar markets libraries that provide tools for entity extraction, document summarization, redaction for key documents, autocomplete and a number of other capabilities that organizations can use to improve the user search experience.

In the developer area, Pingar provides access to view the various capabilities in action. For example, you can paste in the text of a document and see the summarization or view the redaction or any of the other Pingar capabilities. Developers can download an API key to test the code yourself. Pingar supports both C# and Java.

We'll be writing more about Pingar in action over the coming months.

 

What search platform is best? Workshop at KMWorld

Next week in Washington DC, InfoToday runs their Fall enterprise search conferences - KM World, Enterprise Search Summit, SharePoint Symposium, and Taxonomy Boot Camp.. whew! Monday - Halloween Day! - I am giving a workshop at the conferences with the somewhat vague title 'Enterprise Search Technologies'.

What I'll be talking about is an overview of the platform vendors, with some detail on strengths and weaknesses of the vendors; and a drill down into what you need to do before you call the vendors (if you value your time).

You can still sign up for the workshop for $295US or the entire conference for a bit more; see you in DC in a week!

/s/Miles

Java 7: Five days is just not enough time

You may have heard that the recent release of Java 7 has what sounds to me like some serious problems which are discussed on the Lucid Imagination blog. The most telling line i found there -

"These problems were detected only 5 days before the official Java 7 release,
so Oracle had no time to fix those bugs, affecting also many more
applications."

Granted, this is from Uwe Schindler as quoted on Lucid's site - not directly from Oracle. But I have to wonder about any product that is released with known serious flaws like this when they ONLY had five days' notice. I've seen software halted hours before its intended release to investigate a potentially serious bug; did Oracle have to meet revenue at end of quarter, and 'damn the torpedoes'?  

I know Oracle is not (the old) Hewlett Packard which had a legendary commitment to quality. When bugs were found in the earliest HP 3000, Dave Packard made his sales rep buy them back from customers - even from those customers who were happy with their purchase. The reason: The system did not perform as advertised. If every one of your users is going to be impacted, some in very subtle ways that may produce incorrect results - wouldn't you agree that five days is enough time to stop the presses?

Tell me what you think...

 

 

Content owners don't care about metadata

Or do they?

Our recent post about Booz & Company's 'men named Sarah' highlights just how important good metadata can be in order to provide a great search experience for employees and customers.

One of our customers who spoke at the recent ESS 2011 in New York provided some great insights into the problems organizations have getting employee content creators to include good metadata with their documents.

During the ESS talk, they report that content owners don't really seem motivated when asked to help improve the overall intranet site by improving document metadata. However - and this is a big one - when a sub-site owner sees poor results on their own site, they are willing to invest the time to provide really good metadata.

[A bit of background: This customer provides a way to individual site owners within the organization to add search to their 'sub site' pretty much automatically - sort of a 'search as a service' within the enterprise.]

So if you've been thinking of adding the ability to search-enable sub-sites within your organization, but solving the relevance problem is your first task, you might reconsider your priorities!

/s/Miles