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RESOURCES FOR EVALUATING ENTERPRISE SEARCH TECHNOLOGIES
January 20, 2010

Table of Contents

Enriching Web sites to engage customers better
Google mounts a big WAC attack on Microsoft in the enterprise
Coveo Scores $8.2 Million Worth of Funding
A matter of semantics
Text analytics made simpler
Evryx Completes Interim Funding Round
MapQuest Adds 700,000 Business Listings
Contegra Releases Faceted Search Product
Google Increases Efforts to Work with Publishers
New Features for Wolfram|Alpha
TEMIS Launches New Luxid Module
Serials Solutions Completes Beta Testing for 360 Search
MicroLink introduces DiscoverPoint

Enriching Web sites to engage customers better

Firms that rely on advanced Internet services for their marketing, customer relations and other business processes are turning to knowledge management solutions that measure customer response to Web sites, in order to improve traffic and to identify customer preferences so they can retain them and boost sales.

Smart Solutions, a software and Web development company, was working with a local nonprofit firm that wanted to redevelop its Web site to gain new members and achieve higher attendance at events, many of them fundraisers.

“The non-profit wanted to drive traffic to the site, then have visitors engaged in a meaningful way,” says Smart Solutions President Mark Knowles. Smart Solutions was using MindManager 8 from Mindjet for meetings and to collect relevant information from the Internet and other resources. A feature of the software enabled Knowles to map the existing structure of the nonprofit organization’s Web site. 

“By exporting the navigation structure of the site into MindManager, we were able to see the relationships between different [pages and elements],” Knowles says. MindManager displayed the navigation structure as different branches from the same tree, and it was easy to see that some branches weren’t grouped together properly, according to Knowles. That meant that it was difficult for users to navigate.

“The site was static. That tends to happen because Web sites are built organically, a page at a time. After a while, they become disorganized,” he says. “People would come there, but they would leave quickly.”

That’s if they found the site at all. According to Knowles, part of the organization’s problem was branding. People could find the site if they knew what to look for, but they would likely miss it if their search was less specific.

Google, Yahoo and similar services use site navigation as part of their search parameters, according to Knowles. “That’s part of the SEO [search engine optimization] puzzle,” he says.

Once the site was revamped, it was much more intuitive and easier to use, with the nonprofit organization benefiting as a result. Some wording was changed as well, helping to catch the attention of the search engines.

As a result, the site has seen a 25 percent increase in traffic and a 40 percent increase in conversions (memberships and attendance at events), Knowles says.

Retaining customers

Sol Lipman is CEO of 12seconds.tv, which enables users to update their sites with video, as well as to share videos via popular social networks. The site uses 12-second video clips from a customer’s Web cam or mobile phone, with the idea that 12 seconds provides enough time for a short video message. It is also a time span within the video recording capabilities of a large percentage of video recording devices, including many of the newer cell phones. Lipman has relied on customer input to make changes to 12seconds.tv.

One of the most recent changes was a new privacy feature that went live in June, which enables the user to share a video publicly or with only select parties. Customers can also choose default settings to make all videos private except selected ones.

“Our users said that privacy was the most important thing to them,” Lipman explains. Customer retention is important to 12seconds.tv, because site sponsors pay rates based on customer usage.

Customer input comes via UserVoice, a solution that enables visitors to make suggestions and vote on the recommendations of other visitors via an embedded link. The link brings the customer to the UserVoice Web site, where he or she can add input. The top suggestions and recommendations are then placed back on 12seconds.tv for visitor/customer votes.

By using that type of feedback mechanism, companies can mine the untapped knowledge of employees and customers to gain insight regarding products and services. Lipman says virtually all of the changes that 12seconds.tv has made since its launch in July 2008 have come as a result of UserVoice customer feedback.

Other changes have included making widgets more scalable and more functional for people using devices with different screen sizes, and enabling people to download videos.

“We chose UserVoice because we felt that they offered the cleanest, most feature-rich service,” Lipman says. “They allow us to answer customer needs more directly.”

A better dialogue

Jacob McNulty, president of Orbital RPM Learning Solutions, a learning development and marketing consulting firm, touts WordPress as a major factor in the firm’s 150 percent rise in sales in the last two and a half years. The open source blogging tool and a couple of plug-ins have enabled Orbital to more fully engage customers. McNulty sought out WordPress after learning visitors to the firm’s Web site were

“Our visitors were not able to find the information that they were looking for, and we thought we could better utilize the traffic we were getting,” says McNulty. “Our analytics showed us that people weren’t making it past the first two pages.

McNulty adds, “We had a bunch of content, but not an easy way for people to find it. We wanted to be on the most flexible Web 2.0 platform, one that would allow us to organize using tags and categories.”

When a visitor goes to Orbital’s site, he or she sees a tag “cloud.” The more times a visitor has accessed a term on the site, the larger the word in the cloud becomes. That enables Orbital to see what content is the most important to site visitors and provide the appropriate content.

“WordPress is more than just a blogging platform. With the available plug-ins, it can be configured to handle e-commerce or just about anything,” McNulty says. “We wanted to create interaction with our [site visitors] and enable them to dialogue with us. Now they can leave a comment on our site, which enables us to create a dialogue with them and to increase our sales.”

Orbital added a plug-in that enables visitors to upload videos, and the blogging feature allows Orbital to update the content as needed. McNulty credits both the video and the updated content for part of the sales bump.  

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Google mounts a big WAC attack on Microsoft in the enterprise

Microsoft’s financial results and its deal with Yahoo have motivated Google to launch a marketing campaign aimed at Microsoft’s enterprise revenue. The marketing will escalate because Microsoft and Yahoo now threaten Google’s crown jewels of search and advertising. Google wants to gut Microsoft’s strongest money machines, which are its applications and enterprise software. Google has been moving slowly into a position from which an attack on Microsoft’s core assets could be launched. With the forces in place, Google’s on the offensive.

Search alliance

When the green light flashes on the tie-up between the Microsoft and Yahoo search teams, Bing.com becomes the Yahoo Web search engine. Microsoft gains access to Yahoo’s ad sales platform. Microsoft’s commitment to Web search and online advertising comes at a time when revenues across its lines of business have softened. The release of Windows Version 7 will provide a boost to the consumer business, but it will take months for the impact of the new release to generate significant revenues in its enterprise sector. Organizations are often unwilling to upgrade to new versions of operating systems and software until the vendor has had time to shake out the bugs.

The question is, “Will Google see the direct threat of Microsoft-Yahoo as sufficient motivation to put increased pressure on Microsoft’s enterprise business?” I think Google has already begun to rev its enterprise engines. What is surprising to me is that quite a few analysts and Microsoft watchers have not seen the pattern of the late 2009 assault forming.

Three-pronged attack

Let me identify the three prongs of this stepped up effort to bleed revenue from Microsoft’s enterprise revenues. Google provides little information about its strategies, but the company’s technical documents, available from Google Labs and in its public documents such as U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission filings and patent applications, offer tantalizing clues about what it has in its rapid attack force. I monitor those sources and have identified three technical initiatives that suggest the broad outlines of how Google will probe the underbelly of Microsoft’s enterprise revenue.

Google wants to “WAC” Microsoft where any revenue traction can have larger implications for Microsoft’s profitability. Google must make steady progress within the customers of its Google Search Appliance, Postini and Gmail services, as well as its Google Apps like mappings and word processing among others, to inflict significant pain on the Microsoft enterprise hegemony.

The W in WAC represents Google Wave. In my study of Google’s publicly available technical documentation, Wave is a next-generation SharePoint. Microsoft SharePoint is one of its most successful enterprise applications. It is low cost and easy to install. The basic system bundles collaboration, content management, search and workflow functions. A basic SharePoint installation can be scaled to handle thousands of users. The system requires a Microsoft Certified Professional to manage some of the nitty-gritty of scaling, but that is standard operating procedure for Microsoft. Its Certified Partners grab a significant portion of the consulting and engineering support SharePoint requires. Once an organization embraces SharePoint, those who can manage and customize the system often have a permanent job or consulting engagement.

W is for Wave

Wave, which is becoming more widely available, is a next-generation SharePoint. The principal difference between the Microsoft SharePoint approach and the Google Wave one is the fundamental plumbing. Wave is a cloud application. SharePoint, on the other hand, is now an on-premises application, and Microsoft is working to re-engineer the system. The other important difference is that Google is making Wave an open source project. Microsoft’s for-fee approach to software has required Microsoft marketers to explain that open source is not the same as commercial software. Whether Microsoft’s arguments are right or wrong is irrelevant. Google wants to tap the vibes of the open source world, which has implications for developers and bean counters looking to reduce Microsoft Client Access License (CAL) fees.

A is for Android

The A in WAC stands for Android, which is Google’s polymorphic software for mobile devices. Android is described in newspapers and magazines as a mobile phone operating system. However, the Android technology can run on any mobile device. Google’s approach has been a late starter, but the Microsoft mobile technology has lagged. Will Google gain traction against the corporate mobile giant BlackBerry from Research in Motion? I don’t think there will be significant shifts in the short term. But for some organizations, the appeal of a low-cost mobile device that connects seamlessly with Google services may warrant test installations. If the tests are favorable and reduce costs significantly, Google could easily expand into organizations with Android on a range of third-party computing devices. The CEOs might carry a BlackBerry, but certain members of the work force might find Android-equipped devices useful and more desirable.

Unlike Apple, Google is bridging the consumer/business functionality gap. Any foothold in the enterprise allows Google to upsell its other services. Microsoft may find itself squeezed in the mobile market and in the mobile device enterprise business sector without a quick, economical way to thwart Google. Microsoft’s phone initiatives have not become the success that Apple iPhone or even Android have achieved in terms of catching the interest of the young at heart and technically wise buyers.

C is for Chrome

C is a mnemonic for Chrome, which is installed on a computing device. It looks and feels like a browser, but it’s more like a digital air lock. Chrome can connect a computing device to the Google data center. Developers can use Chrome to deliver applications that run on the computing device so that the line between local and cloud-based services becomes irrelevant to the user. Once the device is connected, Chrome can support different virtual Google machines and make the operating system irrelevant. The user gets functionality. In the enterprise, Google-savvy developers can use Chrome to create applications that mimic fully the older, increasingly expensive, on-premises enterprise systems. Microsoft is working to move its enterprise applications to the cloud. The problem is that Google is cloud-ready and moving to the enterprise with an “as is” service;  Microsoft is working in “to be” mode.

I see four thrusts taking place over the next four to five months. First, Google will allow developers, partners and early adopters to explore, test and provide services and applications based on all or some of the WAC components. There’s no charge for a programmer to develop with Google technology. Google partners are becoming increasingly aggressive in developing applications for its enterprise search products. My son, who owns Adhere Solutions in Chicago, sells a Google adapter that hooks a GSA into an enterprise’s proprietary content. A couple of clicks and the GSA gets a turbo boost. He’s not alone. BearingPoint, Onix Networking and dozens of other firms are pushing forward with Google enterprise products and services.

Second, startups and innovation centers in larger organizations are now looking at Google’s products and services as viable test beds for certain applications and services. One large firm known for its expertise in retail is shifting to Google products and services. When a brick-and-mortar firm goes Googley, it is clear that Google is in a position to find a way to pound pitons into the monoliths that Microsoft has put in place.

Third, Google’s Wave, Android and Chrome components play together well. Each can tap into other Google functions such as Checkout (back-office billing and payments) and Google Apps (word processing, presentations, spreadsheets, e-mail and calendar functions) without any additional coding. For clever technologists, WAC provides a playground with quite a few bright, shiny toys and a giant jungle gym. Innovation, therefore, is not Google’s responsibility.  But when one of the developers or innovators hits a proverbial digital home run, Google will be quick to capitalize on that initiative.

Finally, organizations want to use Google. The top management hears that “search should be like Google” and “e-mail should work like Gmail.”

Google will let its users carry the battle to Microsoft in the enterprise. Microsoft has to be prepared to lower its license fees, work hard to keep its Certified Professionals in the fold, and deliver products that work and work well quickly. If the value is not immediately evident, Google will be waiting to whack a solid double, maybe a home run in the enterprise game.   

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Coveo Scores $8.2 Million Worth of Funding

Enterprise search company Coveo announced the completion of a round of Series B financing that secured the company $8.2 million in funds. The round of financing was led by the Business Development Bank of Canada and included additional participation from Propulsion Ventures SEC, The Solidarity Fund QFL, and Coveo Chairman Louis Têtu.

Coveo announced that it plans to use the funs to fund its expansion, with plans to hire an additional 60 employees over the next two years and engage in further product development.

(www.coveo.com)

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A matter of semantics

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.

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Text analytics made simpler

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.

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Evryx Completes Interim Funding Round

Evryx Technologies, Inc., has announced the completion of an interim funding round led by T.R. Winston & Company. Evryx specializes in image recognition technology for mobile devices, and has produced four brands: LinkMe Mobile, ShaLink, Evryx China, and SnapNow. Evryx also powers the Barnes & Noble search app, which boasts a 95% success rate and more than 1 million consumer downloads.

(http://evryx.com)

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MapQuest Adds 700,000 Business Listings

MapQuest announced the addition of 700,000 business listings to its service through a partnership with Citysearch. The businesses span such search categories as restaurants, hotels, shopping, and clubs, and feature additional content such as menus, coupons, and customer ratings and reviews. The company highlighted the additional listings' usefulness through the service's Search Nearby feature, which allows users to find stores, restaurants, and other points of interested located near popular locations such as hotels and convention centers.

(www.mapquest.com)

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Contegra Releases Faceted Search Product

Contegra Systems has released Kaleido Search, aimed at making faceted search more available to applications and ecommerce sites. Faceted search enables filtering of search results by attributes, letting users browse through results selecting criteria relevant to their search.

Kaleido Search is based on the dtSearch engine, which can index over a terabyte of data in a single index.

(www.contegrasystems.com; www.dtsearch.com)

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Google Increases Efforts to Work with Publishers

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)

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New Features for Wolfram|Alpha

Wolfram Research, makers of the Wolfram|Alpha "computational knowledge engine," announced a series of new features and updates for the popular service. New to the service are advanced mathematical functions, including support for Bessel functions, gamma functions, and improved plotting. Updates have also been made to the service's support for discrete mathematics, such as combinatorics and graph theory.

In addition to mathematic functions, Wolfram|Alpha has added features related to science, biology, and health, including a physical exercise calculator that allows users to compute energy expenditure and fat loss for various activities. Also featured is additional information about the solar system, data about carbon footprints, and the ability to reply to more complex queries about earthquakes and meteor showers. Numerous other improvements have been made in fields ranging from socioeconomics to linguistics.

(www.wolframalpha.com)

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TEMIS Launches New Luxid Module

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)

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Serials Solutions Completes Beta Testing for 360 Search

Serials Solutions announced the completion of beta testing for its upcoming 360 Search federated search service, to be released some time in mid-December. The new service will combine features of the 360 Search and WebFeat platforms and add a number of new capabilities and improvements. The Seattle Public Library, the University of New Mexico, and several other organizations participated in the beta test.

(www.serialssolutions.com)

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MicroLink introduces DiscoverPoint

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.

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