Search Engine Meeting Preview

Search is at the heart of modern life, both inside the enterprise and for personal, business, and academic endeavors. Despite its pervasive nature, search remains complex, particularly as user expectations escalate.

Search Engine Meeting (April 27-28 in Boston) brings together leading thinkers who are on the cutting edge of search. It attracts those with a professional interest in search engines, particularly search engine developers and designers, and those interested in applying search engines in their own work environments.

This year, we are particularly pleased to begin the conference with a discussion by Bipin Patel, ProQuest's CIO, on the technical challenges in transitioning three legacy platforms to 21st century standards. The company's large, diverse, and demanding customer base wants search capabilities that look simple but incorporate the complexity of serious research. Like ProQuest, many organizations face the problem of thousands of users, billions of documents, and petabytes of data. Chris Vogt will explain how to build a flexible search platform that works on a massive scale.

Mobile search is one of the newer areas of search engine development. Smart phones, which some consider the computer of the future, present significant design issues. David A. Evans, winner of last year's Evvie Award for best paper at Search Engine Meeting, describes how the user interface can be customized for mobile search.

Social, real-time search has gained prominence in the past several years. Dismissed early on as a fad, social search is now recognized not only as a vehicle for communication and collaboration, but also as a source of valuable information. Steven Arnold cautions that, without context, real-time search results can be misleading. His observations on relevance ranking in social search should prove interesting. Looking at innovations in social search, Microsoft's Jeff Fried asks how social networks can make the core elements of search more relevant. His focus is on techniques for finding people and expertise, approaches for using social behavior to improve relevancy ranking, and the benefits of co-searching.

Taking a contrarian approach, Northern Light's David Seuss claims that search is the wrong application solving the wrong problem. He believes it's often better to ask a person who knows the answer rather than enter a query into a search engine's search box. David Ian Forbes, Emantix CEO, presents a new model for hyperlinking. Noting that hyperlinks were innovative over a decade ago, they've become increasingly irrelevant in the modern search world. His new methods turns on the interface and a semantic/statistic analytics engine.

Other presentations scheduled for Search Engine Meeting take on semantic search, text mining, sentiment searching, and demonstrative queries. The breadth of innovation in search is enormous. In a mere two days of intense immersion in search technology, attendees will learn the newest developments in search technology and be primed to solve the problems they are finding in developing a robust enterprise search platform, in designing next generation user interfaces, and in incorporating scientific knowledge into search products.

Join us at the cutting edge of search. Register for Search Engine Meeting, to be held April 26-27, 2010, in Boston, Massachusetts, at the Hyatt Regency.

www.searchenginemeeting.net

SortFix announced the launch of its eponymous search service, which helps users refine searches. The service works by suggesting specific terms that could be added to searches to garner more accurate results-adding "locations" or "menu" to a search about restaurants in a specific city, for instance. According to the company, the service is designed to replicate the way in which more advanced users refine their searches based on initial results, ultimately ending up with a more tailored and customized experience.

After conducting a search, users are able to select additional "power words" from a list of suggestions and related terms. The service currently supports searches through Google, twitter, and Bing.

(www.sortfix.com)

Bitrix, Inc. has introduced D.I.G. technology, a search engine developed specifically for enterprise intranets and websites to enable search in text, media content, and documents. The engine is available in the company's flagship products Bitrix Intranet Portal and Bitrix Site Manager.

D.I.G. natively supports Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org and Adobe Acrobat documents and enables connection of third-party file parsers for search in specific formats. D.I.G is designed to comply with corporate data security policies. The search results are filtered with respect to the user access rights before being displayed. D.I.G. offers manual or immediate automatic data indexing, making content searchable right after its submission. Users may create complex search queries using query language, inclusion/exclusion masks and logic operators, as well as choose specific site sections for a highly targeted search. The technology supports AJAX-powered interactive pages, provides taxonomy service with automatic tag cloud generation, allows making Google Sitemap, as well as a user-specific search form design. It covers English, German and Russian and enables fast and painless connecting of other languages with third-party stemming tables.

(www.bitrixsoft.com)

Confirmit has announced the launch of Confirmit Horizons Version 15, the new release of its on-demand, multichannel platform for customer feedback, employee feedback and market research applications.

The company says Confirmit Horizons Version 15 introduces a range of enhanced functionality, including Confirmit Flex, a toolkit that allows third parties to develop extensions to Confirmit, turning it into a platform for application development. Further, it reports, V. 15 introduces a new PowerPoint Add-In that integrates directly with Confirmit Reportal—allowing users to create presentation-ready PowerPoint exports quickly and easily. Additionally, improvements to the authoring process make survey design faster, easier and more productive, Confirmit says.

The company reports that in addition to the benefits of Flex, Confirmit Horizons Version 15 increases the productivity of survey and feedback programs by automating repetitive tasks, creating smoother design processes, and increasing flexibility in the way users collect, analyze and share survey data.

Socialtext has released a major new version of its namesake social computing platform. The company reports Socialtext 4.0 enables employees to mobilize in new ways around projects, challenges and opportunities, and delivers new capabilities that span across all of the company's social software modules.

Version 4.0 includes microblogging channels and filtered activity streams to help people digest the information that colleagues share with them throughout the day, as well as new tools for group productivity. Socialtext 4.0 is available on all of Socialtext's flexible deployment options, including its unique on-site managed appliance, which delivers the security enterprises need without requiring IT resources or developers to update and maintain the software. Microblogging channels and filtering are also available on the Socialtext Microblogging Appliance.

Socialtext highlights the following capabilities of its new offering.

• collaborative groups—give users the social software tools they need to quickly circulate knowledge, ideas and updates among team members to get work done faster;
• microblogging channels—allow users to filter the short messages colleagues share with them throughout the day;
• microblogging search—enables users to browse and search as well as target search to messages from a specific group;
• activity stream filtering—allows viewing the activity stream of any group to which you belong, so you can quickly zero in on what's transpired in the group; and
• presence indication—users can hover over a person’s avatar to see their presence, allowing colleagues to know who is reachable at a given moment.

A new release of dtSearch Engine supports new file types and allows users to expand file formats. The text retrieval software is available for Win and .NET, which supports C++, Java, and .NET and for Linux, which supports C++ and Java. dtSearch engine is capable of full-text and fielded data search and works with Adobe Framemaker MIF, XFA form templates, and Visio XML, in addition to its previously-supported file types.

(www.dtsearch.com)

Basis Technology Corporation unveiled the latest generation of the company's linguistics platform, Rosette 7. The new version features expanded language coverage, improved entity extraction accuracy, new name matching and translation modules, and native integration with Apache Lucene/Solr. Rosette 7 enables global enterprises, financial institutions, content providers, and intelligence agencies to quickly identify, analyze, search, and extract meaning from unstructured text in over twenty major languages.

Rosette supports a wide range of applications, including document management for global enteprirses, legal discovery, financial regulatory compliance, and intelligence screening. The platform is currently available for evaluation by potential clients.

(www.basistech.com)

Index Engines and Venio Systems have partnered to provide customers and service partners with a cost-effective, end-to-end solution for e-discovery following the electronic discovery reference model (EDRM).

Index Engines’ indexing technology enables high-speed processing of large volumes of hard-to-access data through direct indexing of backup tapes, and one terabyte/hour/node indexing of online data. Venio Systems offers an e-discovery management platform that allows the analysis, review and export of data using a process that works with all industry standard litigation support applications. The companies say the combination of those two solutions allows e-discovery projects to be executed quickly, effectively and with cost-efficient results.

ChaCha, provider of the Answers Service, is extending that service with a social element that allows users to answer questions about themselves or their businesses. ChaCha.me will extend the functionality of the company's Facebook app.

ChaCha has answered roughly 500 million questions from 15 million unique users since its launch through Facebook, Twitter, iPhone app, SMS, and its call-in line.

(www.chacha.com)

TeraByte Unlimited, Inc. reached an agreement with Microsoft over the use of the word "Bing." Microsoft's search engine shares a name with TeraByte's BootIt Next Generation (BING) software.
The two companies resolved their dispute by entering into a trademark consent and coexistence agreement. Under the agreement, each company would be able to use "Bing" in its own field.

(www.microsoft.com; www.terabyteunlimited.com)