September 15, 2008

Omniture Launches Analytics-Driven Site Search

Web analytics provider Omniture today launched Omniture SiteSearch, a hosted site search product it picked up in its Visual Sciences acquisition, which closed in January 2008.

The SiteSearch product was an early entry in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) space. It was originally launched in 1999 as Atomz Search, part of its content management suite. Atomz was later acquired by analytics provider WebSideStory, which later acquired Visual Sciences. The entire company changed its name to Visual Sciences, and was then acquired by Omniture.

A few clients, including Verizon and BusinessWeek have been using SiteSearch as a standalone product, according to Jeff Minich, senior product marketing manager at Omniture. Today, it becomes an integrated part of the Omniture online marketing suite.

The biggest effect of this is the ability to impact site search results using data from Omniture's SiteCatalyst analytics package. So on an e-commerce site, for example, a search for "shirts" could be made to return the most popular shirts of the season, or those that return the highest margin, or those that are converting highest, Minich said.

"You can set business rules to break ties, or to push a page higher in the results," he said. "You can also combine metrics, and weight them relative to each other, and relative to the natural relevancy ranking in SiteSearch."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 9:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 30, 2008

Mike Moran Exits IBM, Joins Converseon

Mike Moran is leaving IBM after 30 years to take a position in the newly created role of Chief Strategist at social media marketing agency, Converseon. Moran will be involved in the development of Conversation Miner as well as provide consulting to Converseon clients.

“We're thrilled to have Mike join us,” said Rob Key, Converseon CEO. “He brings to the table the perfect combination of industry-leading expertise with hands-on knowledge of how to internally adopt and promote these practices within complex, enterprise environments. As we often say, social media can be technically relatively simple, but culturally quite difficult. His experience will be invaluable as we help leading brands develop and execute innovative social media campaigns. He will also play a key role in consolidating Converseon's position as a leading social media marketing and consulting agency offering end-to-end services, from listening to engaging to measuring.”

While at IBM, Moran led several search technology projects including IBM's OmniFind search and text analytics products, the first commercial linguistic search engine, and automatic categorization technology for business search at ibm.com. He has been granted multiple patents and is the author of Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules.

“With their focus on pushing the edges of innovation in reputation management, search marketing and social media, Converseon is the ideal fit for me,” said Mike Moran. “I look forward to working with their standout team and clients.”

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 27, 2007

IBM enhances free enterprise search software

Earlier today, IBM unveiled a new release of the free IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition enterprise search software. OmniFind Yahoo! Edition 8.4.2 enables users to further customize and personalize their searches to quickly and easily find, access and capitalize on information stored inside organizations and across the Web.

The new version of IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition offers the ability to separate content into different searchable document collections, an improved administration console, and enhanced search support based on the latest open source Lucene indexing library. Other enhancements improve the performance, indexing and custom search field capabilities. It also supports additional browsers.

IBM introduced IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition last December. Since its launch, nearly 25,000 users have downloaded IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition. In addition, numerous ISVs and businesses have developed new offerings that integrate with or support IBM's free search platform.

Earlier this year, IBM announced localized language support to meet expanding worldwide demand for the product in Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Dutch, Hungarian, Polish, Portuguese and Swedish. IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition can search websites and local or remote file systems up to 500,000 documents per instance and search the web all from a single search user interface.

IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition is available at no charge and can be downloaded at http://omnifind.ibm.yahoo.com. Worldwide phone support is available from IBM.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 4:15 PM | Permalink

June 6, 2007

Info Pros Are Searching

This week, the Special Libraries Association held its annual confab in Denver. Perhaps the SLA is improperly named now, as this gathering of over 5,000 information professionals is focused on finding and delivering appropriate online resources. It's certainly not about physical libraries anymore.

When I spoke with attendees, many sounded more like well-funded web site publishers. They want to provide strong search functionality and have very specific requirements. They also are trying to upgrade their sites, create or use RSS feeds, and decide if blogs help. Success is measured by site visitors and overall traffic.

According to SLA Director Cara Battaglini, there are over 11,000 members and growing. They act as info tech purchasers and online curators for their organizations, including law firms, hospitals, news organizations, museums and non-profits, and companies.

At one session, we heard how Intel created useful access to proprietary and open web resources for its employees. Barclay Hill, who managed this year-long project, is a web and systems expert. He created a very straightforward search interface to meet the specialized and general needs of employees. His paper (see Federated Search at the Intel Library) outlines the entire project in detail.

Another professional oversees health information resources for a large hospital group. She's unnamed here, because she feels her current role will diminish over time. Today she actively organizes her web site, working with different publisher interfaces and feeds. While her efforts are appreciated, this expert looks forward to the day when there are well-curated vertical searches and resources used by all health professionals.

Thomas Calcagni, SLA's chief communication strategist, said the SLA embraces the changing roles of information professionals. They teach business skills right along with info technologies. The functional specialties are emerging, including SLA divisions covering competitive intelligence and knowledge management. Members know they must redefine themselves and are specializing quickly.

Librarians have become a nearly-extinct species within non-profits and businesses. They are rapidly transforming into information portal experts instead, and their search expertise will need to ramp up as well. If the SLA sessions are any indication, they are busy sharing how things work. I'm betting many visit SEW already.

Posted by at 10:33 AM | Permalink

December 13, 2006

Yahoo and IBM team up in enterprise search

A minute after midnight, Bill Snyder, Senior Writer for TheStreet.com, broke the story about IBM teaming up with Yahoo in enterprise search.

As of today, the two firms are offering IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition as a free download. The underlying technology for the new product belongs to IBM, but the interface is Yahoo's.

Users of the new enterprise search engine will see the results of their searches of corporate data listed in the same format used by Yahoo's regular web searches, but without the ads. However, the corporate results will also include links to Yahoo web pages, which is aimed at bolstering the company's search traffic.

Check out IBM, Yahoo! Team on Search to read Snyder's story, which broke an hour ahead of similar ones in Forbes, Sydney Morning Herald, FOX News, Houston Chronicle, and AP.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 8:44 AM | Permalink

August 7, 2006

Yahoo Launches Search Builder

During the Social Search Overview session, Tim Mayer of Yahoo announced the launch of Yahoo Search Builder. I haven't had much time to play with it yet, and probably won't until next week. But the Yahoo Search blog has a nice overview of the new product. Keep in mind, this seems very similar to Eurekster, based on my quick quick quick read of it. More on this later.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 1:02 PM | Permalink

June 28, 2006

Google Not The Leader In Enterprise Search

Google is synonymous with "search," everyone knows that, some people hate it and some people love it. An Investors Business Daily article reviews enterprise search and Google's role in that niche. The article explains "enterprise search is a different animal from Web search," that linkage data is not "aren't ideal for helping people find specific data on large private networks." So who are the other players the article mentions? Autonomy, Fast Search & Transfer, IBM's OmniFind, Endeca, and upcoming rival Oracle's Secure Enterprise Search 10g.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:46 AM | Permalink

March 28, 2005

Desktop Search, Google Enterprise, and the U.S. Goverment

A couple of interesting reads from Federal Computer Week.

First, the article: The search is on, looks at the many obstacles desktop search tools have in getting a place on government workers desktops. That said, the next article reports that the USDA is testing Google Desktop Search.

Second, Google turns up fed business reports on how several government agencies including Health and Human Services, the Department of Transportation, and the USDA, are successfully using Google's Search Appliance. The article also mentions a few issues that one user from the USDA had with the product.

At the seminar, during which federal officials offered feedback to Google representatives, [Chris] Niedermayer [USDAs associate chief information officer for electronic government] did note several kinks. He complained about the lack of phone support and documentation for the companys GB-1001 model, which handles up to 1.5 million documents.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:51 PM | Permalink

February 8, 2005

New Video Search Resources from Autonomy and Vodium

Over the past few days I've come across announcements about a couple of new video search products.

First, Autonomy has released IDOL IPTV that allows users to search for and manipulate films, TV programmes and music broadcast over the internet. It's worth mentioning that Autonomy owns Virage, a company that has offered video search tools for several years. According to the news release, this is the technology that Blinkx.TV is using. It's worth pointing out that Blinkx co-founder, Suranga Chandratillake, was once CTO at Autonomy. It's also worth mentioning that Bradley Horowitz, the founder of Virage, is now director of search and media at Yahoo!

Second, I spotted a product announcement from Vodium about the release of their MediaTracker technology.

This D.C.-based company has offered a standalone video search product for a couple of years. MediaTracker now allows customers to optimize their video content for crawling by large web engines like Google. Here's an example:

+ This Google web search: innovation-based cultures includes a direct link to a video of those words being spoken at a university lecture.

Vodium uses speech-recognition technology and human transcription to build the text that you're actually searching. Neat idea. As I've said before, as web engines grow larger and larger and searcher skills remaining like they were when the databases were smaller, the challenge will be not only making the content visible (as Vodium is doing) but also optimizing it again for inclusion into the first few results on a serp. Having access to the transcript would also be very useful for enhancing it's accessibility in open-web specialty video search tools like Yahoo Video.

Posted by Gary Price at 9:50 AM | Permalink

October 26, 2004

Vivisimo Releases Velocity

We don't spend a great deal of time talking about enterprise search on the blog but I think it's worth mentioning that a few weeks after launching Clusty, Vivisimo has released new enterprise search technology called Velocity.

Velocity offers dynamic clustering, and meta/federated search capabilities that allows the searcher to tap both web, fee-based, and internal databases simultaneously while using a common interface. The product also includes the release of Vivisimo's own crawler.

More in this eWeek article: Vivisimo Crawls for the Enterprise

Posted by Gary Price at 2:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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