Search Technologies - Blog

Metadata: The "M Word"

Tue, 14 May 2013 0:00:00 GMT

Filing cabinets in hallways, and archiving departments in basements, are giving way to electronic storage. However, there a number of best practices that we ought to take forward with us. Almost always, documents are still kept in hierarchies which have been designed by humans...

Enterprise Content Browsing

Sat, 11 May 2013 0:00:00 GMT

Humans were storing information in hierarchical structures long before the advent of the personal computer. If you are young, you may never have used a filing cabinet - a physical manifestation of a 2 or 3-level storage hierarchy. Yet you probably still arrange your computer files within some kind of hierarchy

The Gartner MQ for Enterprise Search returns!

Fri, 03 May 2013 0:00:00 GMT

After a few years on vacation, it is great to see the magic quadrant for enterprise search back in action. But product choice is only half of the story.

New Ideas for Search Results Presentation

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 0:00:00 GMT

The availability of an increasing range of content types within the enterprise has driven some of our customers to adopt new approaches to search results presentation. This article is based on a recent implementation project for a large corporate customer.

Search Picture Perfect

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 0:00:00 GMT

Just like in professional photography, with some additional processing of raw content, you can make a big difference in the results you get from text search Here are some lessons that we can learn from professional photography that apply to creating great text search.

The Year in Review, and the 2013 Outlook for Enterprise Search

Sat, 22 Dec 2012 0:00:00 GMT

We'd like to share with you some of the highlights from the past year at Search Technologies, and take a brief look at what 2013 may hold for our industry.

Structuring the Unstructured

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 0:00:00 GMT

The technology cross-over driving acquisitions of enterprise search companies to serve big data applications, and why is enterprise search increasingly associated with the big data world?

ElasticSearch or Apache Solr?

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 0:00:00 GMT

A non-technical comparison of these Lucene-based enterprise search platforms, looking at the background to the projects

HP, Autonomy and Meaning-based Buyouts

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 0:00:00 GMT

A search industry insider's perspective on HP's current challenges. What went wrong with the Autonomy acquisition?

What's New with the Google Search Appliance 7.0?

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 0:00:00 GMT

This article provides a brief, high level overview of the important new functions in Google's latest GSA...

Using Link Analysis with Amazon CloudSearch

Sun, 19 Aug 2012 0:00:00 GMT

This article describes an enhancement added to the Wikipedia Search Lab, an Amazon CloudSearch-based search experience for Wikipedia. The goal was to incorporate a new statistic into CloudSearch rank expressions, based on an analysis of links within Wikipedia. Call it a "PageRank light"...

An Early Look at Search in SharePoint 2013

Sat, 28 Jul 2012 0:00:00 GMT

This article provides a high-level summary of the search capabilities in SharePoint 2013 (aka SharePoint 15). The FAST search technology, acquired by Microsoft in 2008, is at the heart of SharePoint 2013...

Searching Wikipedia with Amazon CloudSearch

Sun, 15 Jul 2012 0:00:00 GMT

When I heard that Amazon was going to create a new web service called CloudSearch, of course I was thrilled to have the chance to try it out. It’s rare to be given the opportunity to really play with a new engine, and of course I’ve known about the A9 search team for many years now....

Harvesting Query Suggestions from Facets

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 0:00:00 GMT

PowerShell may seem like a poseur to *nix users long accustomed to the power of a shell for doing automation, and PowerShell may seem bizarre to Windows users long accustomed to doing automation using programming languages with heavy IDEs like VB. But to me, PowerShell is the natural evolution of the shell into the modern object-oriented and dynamically-typed world. PowerShell brings together the best of two worlds: lightweight scripting environment and dynamically typed objects. ...

Relevancy Ranking Course - Part 3

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 0:00:00 GMT

All of the relevancy statistics in this part have to do with term “occurrence” information. In other words, where do terms occur in the document (word position), within the document structure (format boosting), and within the sentence (syntactic boosting)?....

Hoarding: Buried Alive! (by Data)

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 0:00:00 GMT

A few days ago I participated in a workshop with a new customer to plan their first Enterprise Search initiative. We spent a good deal of time covering security, their content management systems and potential Enterprise Search vendors. During a break towards the end of the meeting, the project manager leaned over to me and said...

Relevancy Ranking Course - Part 2

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 0:00:00 GMT

Field weighting is an especially powerful relevancy technique is to rank documents higher if query terms are found in “high value” fields of the document. The most common example of this is to rank documents higher if query terms are found in the title of the document as opposed to someplace in the body.....

Federated Search: The Options

Sun, 20 May 2012 0:00:00 GMT

There are two distinct definitions of "federated search" within the search engine industry. They imply very different approaches, both conceptually and technically. It is important to understand which of these approaches is best suited to your needs. This article defines and explains the two alternative federated search models......

Relevancy Ranking Course - Part 1

Fri, 11 May 2012 0:00:00 GMT

So, I was going to write an article entitled “Relevancy 101”, but that seemed too shallow for what has become a major area of academic research. And so here we are with a Graduate-Level Course. Grab your book-bag, some Cheetos and a Mountain Dew, and let’s kick back and talk search engine relevancy. .....

Metadata Capture: Don’t Miss the Low Hanging Fruit

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 0:00:00 GMT

The majority of cool new functions in a typical search results interface rely on the presence of appropriate metadata. Yet in many search engine implementations, simple opportunities to capture existing metadata are missed. Although there are a variety of reasons why this occurs, it is perhaps most common where the customer has a laser-like focus on plug-and-play...