February turned cold in California and March brought in cold, wet weather across much of the nation, but the battle for the hearts, minds, and wallets of enterprise search users continues to rage in the enterprise search space. Autonomy has stared to clarify its plans for Verity K2 customers; FAST ships an exciting and greatly improved and renamed ESP 5.0; and Google makes a deal with a big consulting firm in an attempt to extend their reach into the elusive enterprise search market.

A Review of Taxonomies in Enterprise Search: Because taxonomies and the new buzz phrase faceted search are so popular in enterprise search implementations, this seemed like a good time to look back at the articles we've done with respect to taxonomies in previous issue of the newsletter, and to offer some new insights from our prospective in the present. [More].

Secret Stage of the FAST Document Pipeline: Fresh from FASTForward in Miami, we also share with information about the innovative and powerful FAST Document Pipeline that lets you manipulate documents directly during the indexing process. We'll talk about a standard part of the FAST product offering that doesn't seem to be very well known by its customers but that can save you some serious effort during indexing - especially if you're not a Python guru. [More].

Search Analytics Corner: Mark Bennett returns this month with another installment of the Search Analytics Corner with advice on why - and how - you need to keep track of the number of documents that return for a given search. On the web tens of millions of results means you're searching for a hot topic; on your intranet it means you have a problem. [More].

What's New - February - March 2006: Google partners with BearingPoint, Verity Connections 2006 in March, New Idea Engineering exhibits at Enterprise Search in May, and Mondosoft acquires Navigo Systems. More].

Dr. Search: Google Appliance or FAST, Verity, or OmniFind? Nearly every IT department doing an evaluation of enterprise search solutions has heard some vice-president ask, usually during a final project review, "Why don't we just use Google?". Now, don't get us wrong, we love the idea of search-in-a-box: we had considered offering one at SearchButton early in the century. But the Google Search Appliance, even with BearingPoint's help, may not be the right solution for every enterprise search application.[More].

Remember to contact Dr. Search with your questions at support@ideaeng.com.

Site Search Reality Check returns next month!

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