Submissions are due by December 15 for the second annual writing contest conducted by the Federated Search Blog.

Last year’s contest asked blog readers to predict the future of federated search, and it rewarded winners with nearly $1,000 in cash prizes, plus invaluable recognition in the industry through participation on a panel at the prestigious Computers In Libraries (CIL) conference. This year’s contest doubles the cash prizes.

The 2010 contest challenges participants to creatively describe the most impressive federated search application they’ve ever seen or imagined.

Submissions can be in the form of poetry (haiku, limerick, or any other style), essay, video, web-site mock-up or other creative expression.  An independent team of judges will choose first, second and third prize winners, who will earn cash prizes of $1000, $500 and $250 from Deep Web Technologies, sponsor of the Blog. Additionally, the winning submission will be featured in CIL Magazine, and the top winner will participate in a panel at the CIL Conference in Spring 2010. Travel expenses will be paid by Deep Web Technologies.

Contest rules are available at http://federatedsearchblog.com/2009/10/21/broader-contest-bigger-prizes.

 This year's EnterpriseSearch Summit West was a bit different than previous years; alignedclosely with the co-located KMWorld program, the more streamlinedconference allowed search-focused attendees to take full advantage ofthe three day event or to maximize their knowledge seeking across thelarger KMWorld conference. Held November 17-19 in San Jose, Calif., thesummit covered everything from federated and semantic search, to thetopic people just can't seem to stop talking about: social search.

Click here to read the highlights, published at EContentMag.com.

The metadata normalization process for Serials Solutions KnowledgeWorks is getting an overhaul. Through a new series of algorithms and analytical processes, KnowledgeWorks aggregates holdings for each ebook in the library's collection data from all subscribed databases and normalizes them into a single record.

The new ebooks normalization process will be implemented and available in Serials Solutions KnowledgeWorks knowledgebase in January 2010.

(www.serialssolutions.com)

At KMWorld's Enterprise Search Summit West conference, Perfect Search Corporation announced the release of their One Box Extender Model OBX-1B, featuring the ability to index and search over 1 billion database records. The OBX-1B model connects to Oracle, Microsoft SQL, MySQL, and other JDBC compliant devices. The device ties into Google's One Box API, giving that system the ability to index and search massive databases in a variety of formats.

(www.perfectsearchcorp.com)

Specialized search developer and e-publishing company GlobalSpec announced the launch of the My GlobalSpec platform of workflow management tools. My GlobalSpec lets industrial professionals access, manage, and save vital work-related information in a single location, giving them the ability to create lists of suppliers, inventory, and projects. Users can also customize the GlobalSpec homepage with news and information about their particular interests or industry.

(www.globalspec.com)

Recommind has introduced Insite Legal Hold Version 2.0, which is designed to help enterprises identify, explore, assess, preserve and collect electronically stored information (ESI) to prepare for and comply with litigation, regulatory oversight and investigations of every kind.

Insite Legal Hold features Recommind's unique Explore in Place technology, which allows enterprises to review ESI where it resides before it is collected and placed on hold. Version 2.0 features SmartTagger and SmartFilter technologies, which allow organizations to dynamically assess and analyze ESI along myriad parameters before, during and after a single piece of content is collected. Developed specifically to meet today's information risk management requirements, Insite Legal Hold V. 2.0 is said to expedite the early case assessment (ECA) and analysis processes and to make e-discovery more predictable, manageable and ultimately more defensible. SmartTaggers and SmartFilters can be created and customized on a case-by-case basis so enterprises can review data according to their own terminology and processes.

The ability to instantly tag a document or class of documents allows subject matter experts to assess and analyze documents earlier in the e-discovery process, reducing possessing costs and mitigating the risk of inadvertent disclosure of privileged documents. With these new features, says Recommind, the product gives enterprises granular control over the amount of data processed, culled and reviewed, adding a new level of analysis to ECA, greatly reducing e-discovery costs and enabling more strategic, precise and defensible collection processes.

Nstein has announced Semantic Site Search (3S), which employs the company’s text-mining technology to power a faceted site search that returns highly accurate results that are organized categorically.

3S can ingest content from many different indexes from a variety of Web publishing platforms, meaning it indexes material across multiple properties. It then applies Nstein's semantic enrichment process to it. 3S' embedded Text Mining Engine (TME) identifies concepts, categories, proper names, places, organizations, sentiment and topics in particular content pieces and then annotates those documents, creating a semantic fingerprint that exposes underlying nuances and meaning in content.

Nstein reports that 3S is highly configurable and customizable, boasting a visual interface that allows administrators to tweak search sensitivity algorithms without having to modify hard code. 3S comes bundled with front-end widgets designed to improve the search experience. Widgets can be used to point users to "similar content," "most recent content" or virtually any other identifying characteristic of content that one wants to promote. Widgets and the templating engine enable the creation of complex, search-based mashups, across indexes.

A new SaaS feature from ebrary, Title Preview, is now available to the public. Title Preview is designed to help publishers, aggregators, corporations, and others to market their digital content and increase leads.

Title Preview comes with a number of search, display, and browsing options and will be showcased Dec. 1-3 at ALA Midwinter in London.

(www.ebrary.com)

Web design and custom application developer digital-telepathy has released SlideDeck, which is designed to make website content more digestible and interactive. SlideDeck presents a process or product in a storyboard format, doing away with much of the text on a site by condensing key concepts into a series of sliders, rather than entire pages of text. The software adheres to SEO guidelines, as all of the content is viewable to search engines.

(www.slidedeck.com)

StoredIQ announced the launch of StoredIQ Assessment Services, designed to enhance a company's ability to view unstructured data across the entire organization. StoredIQ Assessment Services can discover and assess unstructured information across a range of data sources, including storage, email, archiving, content, document and record management systems, as well as remote desktop environments.

(www.storediq.com)

MicroLink has debuted DiscoverPoint, software engineered to automatically deliver relevant content, connect subject matter experts and enable secure enterprise social networking in a SharePoint environment.

The company says DiscoverPoint helps organizations with vast amounts of information and a heavy reliance on subject matter experts to realize productivity efficiencies by improving information retrieval and enabling companywide collaboration and communities of interest.

MicroLink claims DiscoverPoint eases the burden of manually searching for information and expertise by aggregating information from multiple systems across the enterprise and automatically delivering the results within a single SharePoint interface. By employing user and data analysis techniques, DiscoverPoint builds an understanding of each user’s areas of expertise and interests based on his or her activity, thus eliminating reliance on manual tracking of user skill areas and assignments, as required by other available solutions.

The collaboration benefit is further surfaced through the ability to establish communities of expertise and facilitate improved real-time communications, reducing redundancy of efforts and thereby improving performance, while reducing costs. DiscoverPoint filters both structured and unstructured documents and content including social postings, such as blogs and Wikis.

Google announced changes to First Click Free, a program that allows the search giant to index paid content in a way that is transparent to consumers while still ensuring the ability of the content providers to receive payment for additional content. Google has added a configurable daily limit on the ability of users to view paid content, in order to allow publishers greater control over the ability to monetize content without inadvertently deceiving users through inaccurate page previews.

Google also announced changes to Google News, which will now differentiate between paid and free content in such a way as to be visible to users conducting news searches.

(www.google.com)

TEMIS has unveiled Luxid Content Pipeline, a new content collection module integrated within the latest version of its flagship content discovery solution, Luxid 5.1.

Luxid Content Pipeline is a component that broadens the scope of services available in Luxid 5.1. The easy-to-manage platform efficiently collects content from a full range of information sources and feeds them into Luxid. After annotating content with relevant metadata, Luxid then applies search, discovery and sharing tools to the enriched content and provides users with real-time content analytics and knowledge discovery.

Luxid Content Pipeline accesses content by three different methods: Structured Access connects and automates the collection of documents from leading structured content sources. Web Access tracks corporate Web sites, blogs and social networks, and downloads their content. Enterprise Content Management Access connects to corporate knowledge repositories.

To be as universally compatible as possible with a wide variety of document sources, Luxid Content Pipeline also natively supports the integration of UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) collection readers, enabling the connection to these sources using UIMA standard protocol and format conversion.

Text analytics provider TEMIS has released a new module for Luxid 5.1. Luxid Content Pipeline collects content from a range of sources and, as the name suggests, funnels them into Luxid. After adding metadata tags, Luxid applies search, discovery, and sharing tools to the content and provides users with real-time analytics.

Luxid Content Pipeline also supports the integration of UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) collection readers, enabling connection to these sources using UIMA standard protocol and format conversion.

(www.temis.com)