ITI NewsBreaks reported earlier this week that Microsoft is currently testing faceted search as a feature, presumably for inclusion in SharePoint and/or Live.com. Link to a demo.  Excerpts from the story . . .

Last week, Microsoft announced a major upgrade to the new search engine it has been testing since March. It has moved its Windows Live Search and Live.com out of beta status and said that Live Search will power the search capability on MSN, the company's news and entertainment portal. A new feature is the Related Search function, which is designed to help users refine a query by simply clicking on a list of related terms. The unusually low-key and minimalist press announcement generated little excitement. After some poking around, Information Today, Inc. learned from search expert Stephen E. Arnold that Microsoft has even more potent technology ready to deploy.

Unlike the upgrade to Live.com, which, according to a Microsoft spokesperson, just uses algorithms that mine previously submitted queries to the engine, the new and unannounced search system brings faceted search to a Microsoft application. Try it yourself at http://rwsm.directtaps.net. The Microsoft project, called Search Results Clustering (SRC), currently offers a search beta and downloadable toolbar . . .

Arnold, who is the author of Enterprise Search Report, 3rd edition, and the forthcoming Text Mining Report, said: "If Microsoft makes this function part of SharePoint, it will pose a serious threat to companies offering SharePoint-specific search enhancements and be a strong competitive challenge to Google and its Appliance and OneBox API. If Microsoft puts this technology in Live.com, that service will almost certainly see an increase in traffic. Microsoft had to do something, and this Vivisimo-like clustering may be one of Microsoft's most significant advances yet."

Read the Full ITI NewsBreaks Story

Today we welcome SearchBlox to the ESCenter Demo Center. The SearchBlox demo covers CNN and Amazon content. Try it with a search for the news item of your choice.

Other demos available at this time are: SearchInform, Groxis, Siderean, exalead, Vivisimo, Coveo, Thunderstone, Synomia, Northern Light, Mondosoft, and Isys. Check them all out at the Enterprise Search Center Web site.

Just click on the Demo Center navigation bar item or on the Featured Demo logos on the Home Page.

By special arrangemend with IT.Com, Enterprise Search Center is pleased to offer you the ability to search for news, companies, white papers, and/or Webcasts on any Information Technology (IT) subject of interest to you. Just go to the ESCenter home page and use the IT.Com search box at the top of the page. Results are displayed in columnar format, with answers listed by type (news, companies, white papers, and Webcasts).   Vertical search is hot. IT.Com's solution is cool. Check it out.

About IT.com™  

"We built IT.com to help technology buyers find the best solutions available on the Web—objectively and comprehensively. Unlike directories that only include those vendors who've paid to be listed, or horizontal search engines that dredge the entire Internet with every search, IT.com's vertical search engine delivers natural, relevant results focused exclusively on enterprise IT.

"In a world where search is often inextricably entangled with marketing, IT.com's search engine imposes no hidden, advertisement-driven order on the results it returns. Instead, IT.com uses a special algorithm called dynamic peer ranking to order its results. This algorithm replicates how a large community of buyers judges each vendor's position in the market, so you know the results you see are untainted by marketing bias.

"To ensure that your results are as relevant as possible, we "tune" IT.com's vertical search engine to even more specific topics within IT. Instead of casting their net over the entire space of IT, technology buyers can instruct our search engine to look within, for example, RFID or IT security, optimizing their search from the very beginning.

"By focusing our search engine's scope and ranking results as your trusted colleagues and friends would, IT.com creates an unprecedented tool that puts buyers' interests first in the search for enterprise IT solutions."

In order to support the emerging needs of its clients and meet the expanding definition of search, ISYS Search Software has introduced the latest version of its flagship suite. ISYS, a global supplier of enterprise search solutions for business and government, has a vertical focus on a variety of industries, including government, legal, law enforcement and criminal intelligence, financial services, healthcare, and recruitment. The company's clientele includes the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Department of Justice, California Attorney General, the United Nations, the Ford Motor Company, and Dow Chemical.

Adding 10 languages from the previous version, ISYS 8 now supports over 40 languages as well as more than 150 file and document types. The suite is designed to offer wide-ranging solutions, allowing its users to index, search, and view any files to which they have security access. "When users conduct a query," says Dave Haucke, ISYS VP of global marketing, "they do so in their own language and terms, which obviously leaves a lot up to chance. You have to provide users with more than a nicely ordered results list." In an effort to make results more meaningful, he says the company examined the speed and comfort with which the users analyze and navigate results. "In this version," he says, "those efforts manifested themselves in the form of various features that satisfy the overall goal." 

The software is comprised of three core applications: ISYS:desktop 8, designed to locate information on an individual PC as well as across large corporate networks; ISYS:sdk 8, the embedded advanced search technology for custom applications; and ISYS:web 8, a search solution for websites, intranets and portals, and more. 

New features incorporated in ISYS:web 8 are Enhanced Suggested Synonyms, designed to allow organizations to analyze search behaviors, users, and trends, and the ISYS Search Designer feature, which helps administrators glean live Search Trends data while navigating their sites, giving them the means to pinpoint problem areas and optimize accordingly. 

This time around, ISYS has included a "Best Bets" tag, a tool incorporated to guarantee that a specific document appears as the first result when given for a query. "Our goal is to blur the line between what is possible with the mid-market and the high end and to focus on delivering functionality that previously had been available only in high-end solutions," Haucke says. 

The latest version also features "Federator," which is designed to merge the high volume of disparate information contained across an enterprise with its various geographic locations, incorporating all the indexes in one. This feature enables customers to combine results from various ISYS web servers, thus reducing overhead, improving performance, and ensuring users access to the most up-to-date content. ISYS 8 supports Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server, which ensures security settings by enabling users to view only the authorized content. 

Also new with ISYS 8 is content caching, incorporated to provide another means for improved performance. In terms of scale, "customers can create an unlimited number of indexes, each with a maximum capacity of 64 million documents," Haucke says. "Customers can also chain up to 128 indexes together, providing users with the ability to search a maximum of 8.2 billion documents in a single query." 

According to Haucke, ISYS is "targeted primarily for the mid-markets: small- to mid-size organizations and departments of large enterprises. The mid-markets are our bread and butter, though we do compete with the big markets such as Google and Verity Ultraseek [now Autonomy]." 

As always, ISYS emphasizes navigation and discovery features like categorization, entity extraction, and search analytics reporting. The new version, Haucke says, "completes the transition for us from ISYS 7, which was released last year. We recognized that enterprise search would no longer be viable if it stuck with its rigid query-response model. There was a clear need to evolve the technology beyond this foundation to address a broader set of information access needs." According to Haucke, "It is no longer about search engines but about giving users more than what they expected and broadening their capabilities. The whole idea of search is to save time." 

(www.isys-search.com)   

ISYS Search Software, a global provider of enterprise search solutions for business and government, has announced it was selected by ARUP Laboratories, a national clinical and anatomic pathology reference laboratory and a provider of laboratory research and development, for advanced web search functionality on its public website. ARUP Laboratories, an enterprise of the University of Utah and its Department of Pathology, provides clinical and research information for its clients, offering more than 2,000 tests and test combinations, along with a Clinical Guide to Laboratory Medicine. ISYS:web was selected to power the search functionality on ARUP's website and to provide visitors with access to its content repository.

(www.isys-search.com; www.aruplab.com)

StoredIQ, Inc. a provider of automated Information Classification and Management (ICM) software, has announced Version 4.0 of the company's information management platform. Enhancements include advanced information search, classification, and management functionality in addition to features designed to facilitate ediscovery and erecords management.

This new version is designed to enable ediscovery functions including an ad-hoc query capability for all metadata to iterate searches that precisely gather together required legal files. Further, certified integration of the Litigation Hold capability within EMC's Centera CAS server acts to protect legal files. For proactively managing erisk in the enterprise, StoredIQ offers a number of general business pre-built classifications to identify and take remedial action on problematic content. As an erecords management system, the automatic setting of retention periods on specific classes of files lets organizations execute required data retention policies. StoredIQ is sold as an appliance-based software product in a single, four, or eight-node cluster configuration to address customer needs.

(www.storediq.com)

ClipBlast! has introduced an online video search toolbar and formally emerged from its 18-month beta period. ClipBlast's patent-pending technology gives users the ability to search for video clips from across the web. Consumers and companies alike can add ClipBlast!'s toolbar to their websites and blogs, by copying and pasting HTML code.

The company's patent-pending technology crawls the web in search of video, then categorizes video files, web pages and feeds so that relevant clips can be served up in real-time, on demand. Users can search, save, and share video clips with friends, family and community. The MyClipBlast! personalization tool is designed to enable users to request in advance that video clips on certain subjects be emailed whenever they become available. For site owners, ClipBlast! offers back-end video search technology that organizes and monetizes video libraries.

(www.clipblast.com; www.clipblast.com/toolsSearch.php)

Northern Light, a provider of custom enterprise, industry, and web search engines, has released a new version of the Business Research Engine, which opens the service to all users. All users of the Business Research Engine can browse the Market Intelligence Centers (MIC), access the featured reports and resources from the web, and can use the Business Web search without limitations as well as the new white paper search. Users can search the full-text of trade journal and business news databases without limitation to see if there are interesting and relevant articles. A subscription or day pass is required to read articles from the journals and business news sources and to take advantage of the advanced functionality like Search Alerts, Public Alerts, and user preferences. There is no advertising on the site, no pop-ups, no paid inclusions, no text ads pretending to be search results.

Credit card subscriptions to access the premium content and features can take two forms: a monthly subscription for $9.95 or, a new option with this version, 24 hour day passes for $4.95. Subscribers have unlimited access to all content and features. There are also annual enterprise licenses available for $5,000 for up to 50 seats and $36,000 for an unlimited number of users. Some highlights of new features are: a reorganized design of the site; browse by topic; the ability for users to toggle their search; public alerts; the ability for users to set preferences; review account details; and an administration center.

(www.northernlight.com; www.nlresearch.com)

For more information: www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb060911-2.shtml

JumpTap, Inc., a provider of carrier-centric mobile search and advertising solutions, has unveiled its JumpTap Advertising Suite and a Mobile Search Index for mobile operators. The JumpTap Mobile Search Index is a catalog of websites designed specifically for mobile phones and customizable for operator specific business rules. The Mobile Search Index is designed for subscribers to discover off-portal content by returning relevant websites from the index, complete with title, page snippet, and URL. The JumpTap Mobile Search Index also provides previews and shortcuts for certain search results including "buy" functions, "audio preview" and "image preview." By working with the mobile operator and their subscriber information databases, JumpTap can also provide personalized suggestions and alternate search recommendations. JumpTap has utilized a combination of spidering techniques, site submission, XML feeds, and editorial control to create an index of searchable mobile sites.

The Mobile Search Index is designed to be used in combination with the JumpTap Advertising Suite. While the Mobile Search Index allows subscribers to find off-portal content and services, the JumpTap Advertising Suite provides operators with a solution for generating mobile advertising revenue. The JumpTap Advertising Suite offers a full set of advertising methods, including pay-per-click, pay-per-call, banners, and interstitials. Both solutions are accessible via JumpTap's WAP, BREW, and Java user interfaces. JumpTap's Mobile Search Index allows off-portal and on-portal mobile properties to be discovered by organic searches when subscribers are using the mobile operator's branded search interface. JumpTap's Mobile Search Index will be populated through: Site submission; Carrier portal directories; Spidering; and Intelligent discovery. The JumpTap Advertising Suite is designed to allow any company that wants to reach mobile subscribers to promote their content and services via the mobile phone.

(www.jumptap.com)

Google has announced that Google News has archive search to help users search for events, people, and ideas over different periods of time. When users search for an historical event or person, they will see relevant articles related to their query, and they will be able to browse an historical timeline to get a broader overview of the results. Articles related to a story or theme within a given time period are grouped together to allow users to see more perspectives on the events.

Users can also narrow their searches to specific time periods or publications of interest. Users can search archives from Google News by clicking on the 'News Archive Search' link. For selected queries, users of Google web search may also see links to the top three related articles from the news archives integrated at the bottom of the result page. The service is being launched on the news.google.com domain and enables searching of articles in English as well as articles in a number of other languages.

Archive Search includes freely available articles from sources such as TIME.com, The Guardian, and others, as well as snippets of articles available for a fee or via a subscription, such as those from news organizations like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. Newsweek Interactive, and from news aggregators like AccessMyLibrary.com from Thomson Gale, Factiva, HighBeam Research, LexisNexis and others. When searching news archives, results are ranked based on relevance.

(www.google.com)

SearchInform has introduced a new version of its full-text search software, which is said to be easier to use and to provide better database indexing.

The company highlights the following enhancements to SearchInform 2.4:

• phrase search with due attention to stemming and synonyms dictionary;
• new similar document search;
• improved indexing speed (from 15GB/hour to 30GB/hour);
• index size of no more than 15 percent to 25 percent of the actual text information volume;
• support for more than 50 text file formats, including Outlook and TheBat e-mails, mp3 and avi tags, as well as Microsoft Instant Messenger and ICQ logs; and;
• universal data sources (indexing of DBMS fields and various information systems).