Social search is still so new, it can sometimes be hard to get experts to agree on what it is or, more importantly, what it has the potential to be. "Too often we think of social search as the search box in Twitter or Facebook, but neither represents the true value that social search will bring," says Augie Ray, senior analyst, social computing for interactive marketing professionals at Forrester Research. As even major search engines such as Google and Yahoo! offer social search results and new specialized tools pop up, the face of search may just be changing forever.

"Today, search is merely about finding data, but social search will be about aggregating opinion and insight," says Ray. "Rather than entering ‘Restaurants in San Francisco' into a search box and receiving page after page of links to disparate information, social search will be about ‘finding the best pizza in San Francisco,' and those results will be based on the opinions and behaviors of the people who matter most to you." Could the days of gaming search engine optimization algorithms be behind us? Will asking your Facebook or LinkedIn networks replace asking the massive, all-knowing search engines?

"It turns out that people trust other people that they perceive to be authentic in their opinions and reasonably knowledgeable about a particular subject," says Walter Knapp, COO of Lijit Networks, Inc., which provides social search solutions for businesses. "For example, when someone goes out to purchase a new car, a new camera, or a new bicycle, they might go to a manufacturer's website for the specs and the technical details-but they go to the community for opinion, reviews, recommendations, and other anecdotal information. This information they get through social interactions. Offline, they ask their friends. Online, they read blogs, use their social network, and things of that nature."

Still, it seems that social search means something different to just about everyone, depending on their perspective. Users might think of social search as simply asking a question of their networks. But for companies such as Lijit, it means something more.

Lijit's site search and content discovery tools aggregate social media content sources, including websites, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, and more. All content sources are integrated into native search results, and readers can drill down by social media type to find the most pertinent information. In September, Lijit started offering a Lijit Picks tab, which provides an overview of the top three search results from each content source.

On Whostalkin.com, users can look for conversations surrounding search topics. Its search and sorting algorithms combine data taken from more than 60 of the internet's most popular social media gateways. On Socialmention.com, companies-or individuals-can sign up for daily email alerts about mentions of anything from your brand or CEO to celebrity gossip.

As the public's search habits and expectations change, so too must companies. Simply popping up at the top of Google's results may no longer be good enough. "Companies can prepare for the future of social search in the same way they are preparing for social media-finding fans, encouraging positive dialogue about the brand, generating advocacy, and the like," Ray says. "The more brands can generate positive comments, tweets, blog posts, ratings, and reviews, the better they can prepare for improvements in social search and discovery technologies."

Someday, though, Ray thinks search as we know it could all but disappear. He already sees some changes moving in that direction. "We won't always be needing to search for information because the information we need or want will arrive to us," he says. "This is already happening today, for example, with news. More people are finding the news that matters most to them from their Twitter followers or on Facebook rather than having to visit or search on news sites. This trend will continue to impact how we discover and hear about products and services."

(www.lijit.com; www.whostalkin.com; www.socialmention.com)

The Enterprise Search Summit Spring 2011, which will be held May 10-11 in New York -- with pre-conference workshops on May 9 -- is now accepting speaker proposals at www.enterprisesearchsummit.com/2011/CallForSpeakers.shtml

The deadline for submitting proposals is December 1, 2010. Organizers seek dynamic speakers to discuss detailed aspects of implementing and maximizing search within an organization. This year’s Summit will examine ways to leverage search tools, information architecture, classification, and other strategies and technologies to help employees work smarter through the deployment of intelligent search solutions.

Consider such topics as: Integrating search into systems and workflow; Open Source Search; Mobile Search; Search and cloud computing; Search enabled decision making; Customizing your search solution and more. For more information please review the full Call for Speakers.

(http://www.enterprisesearchsummit.com/Spring2011)

Content Analyst and TCDI have announced a strategic partnership whereby TCDI will incorporate Content Analyst Analytics Technology (CAAT) into its proprietary e-discovery application suites: Discovery WorkFlow and ClarVergence.

The companies say the partnership offers TCDI's clients improvements in document review efficiencies and increased visibility into their document collections. The enhanced analytics will also reduce the time and cost associated with document review.

Content Analyst is well respected for its advanced text analytics tools, based on patented latent semantic indexing technology. Its approach to text analytics has been the development of a single platform, named Content Analyst Analytical Technology (CAAT), that can perform a variety of functions on the same basic index structure.

Attivio has unveiled five unified information access (UIA) solutions, based on its flagship Active Intelligence Engine (AIE).

They include:

AIE for Enterprise Information Integration, which is designed to overcome costly and time-consuming data normalization obstacles to deliver an agile and integrated view of the information needed for insight, decisions and actions, regardless of source or format.

AIE for Enterprise Performance Management, which ensures organizations can seamlessly capture and measure all relevant data and key performance indicators (KPIs), providing deep insight to optimize performance across the enterprise.

AIE for Enterprise Relationship Management, which provides a comprehensive and up-to-date way to coordinate insight on all aspects of relationships with other departments, partners and service providers, avoiding missed opportunities on new projects, discounts and negotiation leverage.

AIE for Customer Interaction Management, which delivers integrated information from all customer-related data and content systems, such as customer relationship management systems, transaction and fulfillment databases, e-mails, call logs, etc., to boost customer satisfaction, loyalty and up-sell opportunities.

AIE for Social Brand Management, which offers a single, complete view of customers, brands and products/services by integrating social network content and entity-level sentiment analysis with more traditional sources of information, including databases, e-mail, documents and RSS feeds for sharper, more immediate detection of trends, issues, shifts in opinion and impact on sales.

Additional features available with Attivio's Active Intelligence Engine as well as these new solutions include the ability to close security gaps with rapid-update permissioning, so restricted material can be included in results for authorized staff. The platforms also provide the application of fuzzy + SQL queries to expand information exploration as well as improve navigation, discovery and relevancy of results. Further, all the offerings are supported by the company's new customizable Active Dashboards now available for any AIE implementation, which present all relevant information in interactive, graphical displays.

IBM announced the acquisition of PSS Systems, a privately held company based in Mountain View, Calif. PSS Systems designs software that helps organizations analyze, automate, and implement information governance policies across large amounts of electronic business information and dispose of that information in an automated way. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

According to the companies, PSS Systems' established base of clients includes seven of the top 10 Fortune 500 companies, as well as companies such as Abbott, BASF, BP, ConocoPhillips, Devon Energy, First Data, GE, and Pfizer.

IBM intends to integrate PSS Systems within the IBM 's Software Group.

In related news, IBM unveiled the latest version of its Informix database software. The new version of IBM Informix is designed to help companies power business analytics along with transactional applications. To handle the growing volume of data, the new software also includes time series data management and data compression.

IBM is also introducing the new IBM Informix Flexible Grid, which gives clients the ability to scale data management across regional or global clusters while mixing different hardware and operating systems. The Informix Flexible Grid keeps data available to applications at all times, even during planned maintenance and upgrades, without the need for temporary hardware.

(www.ibm.com)

ChaCha, the free answers service, launched a new ChaCha.com that is further focused on user experience and advertising engagement. The new site takes advantage of HTML5 and CSS3 to add additional relevant, related images and videos to support questions and answers that come to the site.

The new site is being released through a phased approach, deploying the launch with a new design that uses standard HTML5 features. Additional functionality will be rolled out over the coming weeks. Other user improvements include ChaCha Topics pages, the ability to assign user ratings to answers, tighter integration with social networking sites, and expanded support for web browsers.

(www.chacha.com)

Oscar Wilde once wrote, "It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information." Few are likely to share Wilde's sentiments in this day and age-at least in the information industries-but it's true that the volumes of information now at the fingertips of companies and enterprises present unique challenges, not only in terms of understanding but also preservation, indexing, and security. And that's just general database management; when that database also handles large amounts of unstructured data, the problems are even more pronounced.

One of the companies helping the enterprise meet these challenges is MarkLogic. The company has apparently had a very productive year so far, with its number of customers now topping 200 and including the likes of LexisNexis, Cengage, and Elsevier, along with a number of government clients. And with the 4.2 release of their MarkLogic Server platform on October 19, the company is showing that it hasn't forgotten about the fundamentals.

According to Ken Chestnut, VP of product marketing, MarkLogic Server 4.2 focuses on the three key areas that are of greatest concern to the company's customers: agility, robustness, and enterprise search and discovery. To that end, the company is beefing up its database offering with a host of improvements, including the ability to adjust search relevance based on geographic proximity to a resource and expanded support for XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation), a language that makes it possible to transform one XML document type into another.

According to Chestnut, XSLT support makes it possible for customers to syndicate data to new platforms-such as various mobile devices-without the need to significantly redesign their CMS systems. "If I'm a media customer, I want to be able to quickly support the iPhone, the iPad, the nook, the Kindle," says Chestnut. "And I want the flexibility and the agility to support new devices that might not be known [yet]."

MarkLogic Server 4.2 is also adding the ability to roll back a database to a prior point in time, a feature that Chestnut describes as being akin to the Time Machine backup utility developed by Apple for OS X. In the event of a catastrophic failure that causes damage to a database, users can immediately revert the database to a particular time-stamp. "[Customers] want to be able to roll back as quickly and effortlessly as possible from that catastrophic event," says Chestnut.

Other new features for 4.2 include the replication of information across different databases to aid in disaster recovery and improve search response times, improved automatic response to server failures within hardware clusters, and the ability to return the most distinctive terms in a document.

Along with updates and new features for MarkLogic Server, the company is also releasing Information Studio, an ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tool that joins MarkLogic Application Builder, Search API, and Library Services API as part of MarkLogic Application Services. The tool gives users access to a web-based interface to load unstructured data into a MarkLogic database.

"Basically, it's a web-based graphical interface that allows me to literally load things in MarkLogic Server just by dragging and dropping them," explains Chestnut.

The new features and updates in MarkLogic Server 4.2 were driven partly by the requirements of its customers, according to Chestnut. He specifically points to the rollback feature as something that the company's clients in the financial services sector needed, where database recovery can become an arduous process that would otherwise require duplicating hundreds of transactions to bring the data back up to date. Other features, such as those dealing with search and discovery, were driven by customers such as LexisNexis.

But while many of the new features were driven by specific needs from customers, Chestnut also thinks that the features will find broader use. "We believe our technology and our products are horizontally applicable," he says, adding, "I think all of our customers will benefit from them in one way or another."

(www.marklogic.com)

Lucid Imagination announced LucidWorks Enterprise, a commercially-supported search platform that builds on Apache Lucene and Solr. Lucene reports that LucidWorks Enterprise extends the capabilities of Apache and Solr, giving users access to more enterprise-grade features. These new features include SolrCloud, which provides simplified configuration management, load balancing, and failover in a distributed environment; CLICK Scoring, which takes into account searcher feedback in the relevance ranking of documents; and new data acquisition functions, such as a crawler and scheduler that simplifies the process of transferring data into LucidWorks Enterprise.

(www.lucidimagination.com)

Darwin Ecosystem released the Darwin Awareness Engine, a product able to analyze complex underlying patterns in markets over time in addition to the events that have an impact on these markets. The Awareness Engine further allows organizations to create, test, and refine hypotheses regarding the driving forces behind market events, and compare and inform those hypotheses with conversations and data that appear on the web. This web data is presented in a Scan Cloud, which uses correlation between key words as its basis, as opposed to the relevance ranking of search engines. Darwin reports that the Darwin Awareness Engine disposes of the need for organizations to search for sources manually, which can be a time-consuming process.

(http://darwindevcorp.com)

Endeca Technologies and MeLLmo announced a strategic partnership to develop and deliver new mobile BI applications. The apps are designed to enable on-the-go decision-making and will involve the integration of their disparate flagship BI products, Endeca Latitude and Roambi ES3.

Endeca Latitude combines search and BI to help people find what they need and understand what they found, while MeLLmo's Roambi gives on-the-go workers interactive visualizations of company data on a mobile device. The two companies have already begun work to integrate Endeca Latitude with Roambi ES3, allowing employees at all levels of the organization to push data from Endeca discovery applications to iPhone or iPad visualizations for further analysis. The first co-developed offering is targeted for delivery by the end of 2010.

(www.roambi.com, www.endeca.com)

ISYS Search Software, a developer of embedded search and universal information access solutions, released ISYS Document Filters 2010, the new version of the company's text extraction, printing, and viewing platform. The solution gives enterprises a component for text analytics, e-discovery, email archiving, data loss prevention, and other content processing systems.

ISYS Search Software develops embedded search and universal information access solutions, enabling the virtual aggregation of corporate knowledge and providing a single point of access to information spread across enterprise systems.

(www.isys-search.com)