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RESOURCES FOR EVALUATING ENTERPRISE SEARCH TECHNOLOGIES
October 03, 2007

Table of Contents

Search gets even smarter
SearchInform Technologies Inc. Updates SearchInform
Reuters Labs Launches Facial Recognition Platform with Viewdle, Inc.
Tayait.com Uses Exalead's Search Technology to Power Arabic Search Engine
DocZone.com introduces pay-per-minute plan
Conference Archives, Inc. Launches Ekatius
Fusa Capital Launches Podcast Search Service
Accelerate e-discovery
Directly from the analysts
Search Combining with Online Advertising

Search gets even smarter

Endeca has introduced a new series of modules that will extend the capabilities of the Endeca Information Access Platform (IAP). The Endeca Discovery Suite has been designed to increase online revenue by boosting conversion rates and content consumption.

The suite's first two entries are the Social Navigation Module and Search Engine Marketing Module. Future modules will focus on personalization and recommendations, closed-loop reporting, multichannel operations and back-end integrations--all with integral support for Web 2.0 interactivity.

Endeca's Social Navigation Module can be used with best-of-breed social media software from Endeca's strategic partners, as well as in-house solutions, and includes:

  • content adapters that provide out-of-the-box integration between the Endeca Information Access Platform and well-known user review software;
  • dedicated content acquisition and indexing capabilities to ingest all types of user-generated content, regardless of source or format;
  • tag extraction capabilities to pull together and reveal common themes, concepts and entities from text-based reviews, blogs and posts for use in site navigation, search relevancy and search engine optimization;
  • tag-based visualization and navigation to complement static and dynamic site navigation, giving users more ways to explore and find desirable content and products;
  • meta-relational capabilities to link different content types by common concepts, allowing people to dynamically summarize the user-generated content associated with any set of products;
  • content aggregation abilities, combined with Endeca's patented search and guided navigation experience, enable the exploration of all reviews and other user-generated content spread across a site or collection of sites by the criteria most relevant to their goal;
  • profile-based navigation to help users find information and products by others with similar tastes, desires and characteristics;
  • reference applications to speed development time and ensure best practices for common use cases; and
  • on-the-fly graphical analytics components to improve customer insight and decision making by visually summarizing user-generated opinions into navigable charts and graphs.
      Capabilities of the Search Engine Marketing Module include:
      • a new version of Endeca Sitemap Generator to simplify the task of indexing dynamic Web pages by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live Search, Ask.com and other key Web search engines and support for several out-of-the-box output formats; and
      • an automated URL optimization API that turns dynamic page URLs into SEO-friendly text-based URLs, giving the appearance of static, keyword-rich directory pages, resulting in higher rankings for billions of dynamic pages.
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      SearchInform Technologies Inc. Updates SearchInform

      SearchInform Technologies Inc., an information technologies company with special focus on information searching, storing, and processing, has announced an upgrade of SearchInform, its corporate system of full text search and search for documents with similar content in large data volumes. In SearchInform 4.2, the user now has an option of indexing only the text that the documents contain. The final index ends up being rather compact, can be defragged and compressed by archiving tools. With this indexing mode enabled, the final index will only contain the unformatted text data from all indexed documents, which allows SearchInform 4.2 to process search queries more quickly.

      (www.searchinform.com)

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      Reuters Labs Launches Facial Recognition Platform with Viewdle, Inc.

      Reuters Labs has launched facial-recognition search capabilities on Reuters.com using Viewdle Inc. technology. Reuters Labs, where Reuters showcases emerging technologies and tools on Reuters.com, will use the Viewdle engine to automatically extract metadata from select Reuters satellite streams and provide real-time indexing and search capabilities. Viewdle is a facial-recognition powered digital media platform for indexing, searching, and monetizing video assets. Viewdle, which fuses visual analysis technology, actually looks "inside the clip," frame-by-frame, to identify true, contextually relevant appearances of people on-screen.

      (www.viewdle.com, www.reuters.com)

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      Tayait.com Uses Exalead's Search Technology to Power Arabic Search Engine

      Exalead, a global provider of search software for business and the web, today announced that its unified search technology platform--exalead one:search --is being used by tayait.com to power a new Arabic-language search engine, tayait.com, as part of a new technology partnership between the two companies. Tayait.com, a provider of Arabic Natural Language Processing based services, officially launched its specialized search engine last week in conjunction with GITEX, an Information Technology exhibition that was held in Dubai, UAE. The new search engine is now available online for free, providing a search engine for news, entertainment, and information in Arabic from web sites around the world.

      (www.tayait.com, www.exalead.com)

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      DocZone.com introduces pay-per-minute plan

      DocZone.com has unveiled its new Pay-Per-Minute pricing plan, designed to make the benefits of XML content management more affordable.

      The new pricing option, immediately available, allows DocZone customers to purchase blocks of minutes for a fixed per-minute rate, with discounted rates available with the purchase of larger amounts of usage time. There are no restrictions to the number of users who can share the purchased minutes within a customer's DocZone environment.

      Prices are as low as 24¢/minute.

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      Conference Archives, Inc. Launches Ekatius

      Conference Archives, Inc. released the Ekatius platform, which enables the development and delivery of association conference-based content to institutions. Ekatius includes proprietary software and systems-integration solutions intended to automate the input, creation, manipulation, processing, and output of rich-media data elements such as audio, images, slides, text, and video. For institutions, the Ekatius platform presents a new educational resource that aggregates media-rich, hard-to-find, event-based knowledge elements such as abstracts, posters, and oral presentations. Previously, access to the event-based knowledge was largely limited to association members and attendees; however, it is now available to institutions, and is made available within 60 days of the conclusion of an event. Additionally, the Ekatius platform has advanced search functionalities allowing users to search either within a specific event or across several events.

      (www.conferencearchives.com)

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      Fusa Capital Launches Podcast Search Service

      Fusa Capital Corporation, a developer of consumer search and navigation services, launched www.podanza.com, a free audio and video podcast search engine that allows consumers to find, organize, and consume thousands of podcasts from around the globe. The Podanza site, part of the Fusa Consumer Search Network, is based on the same search engine technology that is used to operate Fusa's other search services, Searchforvideo and Newstowatch. Podanza aggregates podcasts from thousands of publishers, organizes them by category and provides relevant keyword search so users can discover and consume podcasts and specific podcast episodes from their web browser.

      (www.podanza.com)

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      Accelerate e-discovery

      Recommind has introduced Axcelerate eDiscovery, which is said to offer a number of industry firsts, including First-Pass Review of an entire document collection, One-Click Coding of documents and a number of sophisticated tools that significantly expedite the review process, improve attorney efficiency and lower e-discovery costs for clients, says Recommind.

      The company explains that by automatically organizing even multi-terabyte document sets by myriad parameters including responsiveness, issue, privilege and concept group, Axcelerate eDiscovery's First-Pass Review makes review organization and document batching simpler, more accurate and quicker than ever before. Simultaneously, Recommind says, Axcelerate's One-Click Coding feature makes a computer-generated judgment--with explicit confidence score--about each document's relevance, responsiveness and privileged nature, significantly speeding the actual review process while concurrently improving accuracy and lowering the risk of missing key documents.

      Axcelerate eDiscovery further offers law firms and enterprises more accurate and extensive document culling and filtering of virtually all document types, including both structured and unstructured data, Recommind says. The solution automatically filters duplicates and near-duplicates between and across custodians and parties, and offers contextual e-mail thread analysis, while also applying more than 17 additional filters to a document collection. The product's early case assessment tools then automatically extract key documents, people, phrases and concepts of interest, helping attorneys and paralegals quickly understand the contents of a document collection before the review process has even begun.

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      Directly from the analysts

      Northern Light has introduced Analyst Direct, a service the company says helps technology marketers, product planners, analyst relations specialists and other professionals search reports from multiple research firms simultaneously and seamlessly access reports using their existing analyst site logins.

      Analyst Direct provides integrated search of tens of thousands of market research reports from IT analysts including Forrester, Gartner, IDC and other leading firms. It leverages Northern Light’s award-winning search engine and patented results classification to search all reports, using a single search and alerting interface and relevance ranking, so users never miss a single report they need.

      Analyst Direct is an individual subscription version of Northern Light’s SinglePoint. A free, two-week subscription is available here.

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      Search Combining with Online Advertising

      Firms offering large scale search capabilities were on the prowl for online advertisers earlier in the year as Google acquired Double Click, Yahoo! purchased Right Media, Microsoft bought AdECN, and AOL acquired Tacoda. At press time, all of these deals were expected to close by the end of the summer.

      "I think what the trend indicates is that companies with portals are looking for key search components," says John Blossom, president of content industry consultancy Shore Communications, Inc. "They’re trying to get their ads in front of the content that audiences care the most about. It’s a matter of trying to come up with revenues beyond what they can earn from their own content."

      That’s not to say each acquisition was one search company following the lead of another, according to Blossom. "Each company may have its own goals. Yahoo! is still focused on providing value for brand advertising, which is much of Google’s strength."

      Yahoo! already owned 20 percent of Right Media, a stake it purchased in October of 2006. By acquiring the remaining 80 percent, Yahoo! gained full ownership of the underlying technology that allowed it to launch its SmartAd program in early July, which enables marketers to present targeted online display ads in real time. SmartAds combines Yahoo!'s consumer insights and rich media capabilities with the serving technology to convert marketers creative campaign elements and offerings into targeted and relevant display ads.

      Microsoft’s purchase of AdECN was the company’s third purchase of a digital advertising firm in two months. Microsoft acquired mobile advertising provider Screentronic, then purchased aQuantive for $6 billion, a deal that closed in mid-August. AdECN is the company’s final element in its digital advertising portfolio, Microsoft reported at the time of the acquisition. Upon completion of the aQuantive deal, Microsoft boasted of its plans to become one of the top two firms in terms of online advertising, meaning it would have to leapfrog at least one of the top two (Google and Yahoo!).

      "The Microsoft acquisition is particularly interesting," Blossom says. "AdECN is modeled after stock exchanges used in financial securities markets, requiring matching sellers' inventories against offers from advertisers, dealing only with existing ad networks as its members." This enables excess advertising demand from one ad network to flow over to another network. Each network would receive a portion of the ad fee that matches the percentage of buyer’s advertising on the network for the brokered transaction.

      AdECN’s revenue takes a small processing fee for each transaction as well as upfront membership fees.

      At the time of the acquisition, AOL said it planned to use TACODA's technology to extend AOL’s target market to advertisers and publishers while also extending the reach of its third-party display network. "Advertisers are recognizing that ad networks will place their ads where they do the most good," Blossom says, likening online ad networks to traditional advertising agencies that would work to place ads in targeted print, radio, and television outlets. The traditional media have fallen sharply in terms of audience, so advertisers are moving larger portions of their advertising dollars online. But they still want ads delivered to a targeted audience rather than large, mass online readerships.

      "Micromarkets are becoming increasingly important," says Blossom, who expects marketing to evolve to include more behavioral and incentive-based advertising based on a person’s click patterns and other online usage--allowing marketing messages to be tailored to specific user behaviors and interests online.

      (www.aol.com, www.google.com, www.microsoft.com, www.yahoo.com, www.shore.com)

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