Locator: NIE Home / Publications / Enterprise Search Newsletter / Volume 3 Number 6 / What's New
What's New
Volume 3 Number 6 - December 2006
IBM and Yahoo! have announced a collaboration to provide a version of the IBM Discovery Edition search solution for free for up to 500,000 documents per server. The Discovery Edition, based on the iPhrase products acquired by IBM last year, is at the heart of IBM's new push in enterprise search.
This is a clear shot across the bow to Google, who market the Google Search Appliance for sites with smaller content stores. 2007 should be a very interesting year indeed!
Ms. Dewey is a new web search site is featuring a novel front end featuring the actress Janina Gavankar as a futuristic librarian/search avatar to answer your questions. Many in the blogosphere are critical of this cute marketing experiment put together by ad agencies EVB and MRM, but remember that many ideas greeted initially with criticism eventually win acceptance.
Ms. Dewey lets you search the Microsoft LiveSearch service using a more user-friendly persona than the puppy dog in Office. The Ms Dewey web site is search with an attitude. Ms. Dewey has cute quips for a number of searches. Check out 'news' and 'Janina Gavankar'. Also, be sure to let Ms Dewey sit idle for a few minutes to see what happens when she bores of idle waiting. Ms. Dewey is certainly a long way from "Bob".
Our take? A more interesting persona than the old Apple Knowledge Navigator grad student, but we're not sure the world is ready for a search engine with an attitude. Still, imagine some future time (Search 4.0?) when searching offers great contextual results and an interface that is more interesting than a simple text box. Only time will tell - meanwhile, enjoy.
hakia, which bills itself as the "first meaning-based search engine", is in beta test now and open for search. Dr, Riza Berkan, CEO of hakia, whose background includes nuclear engineering with a specialization in artificial intelligence and fuzzy logic, says his technology utilizes a radically new infrastructure designed to deliver the most relevant results.
Searching the site, hakia does have some interesting results for many searches, including for many "example" queries like Why did Enron collapse? and for Frank Sinatra. But for less obvious searches - for example Mike Lynch of Autonomy - returns results about a broadcast meteorologist and a medical products company president.
Overall, hakia seems to know a good deal about well known celebrities and some popular subjects. But ask "Who was the president before George Bush" and hakia does about as poorly as Google. But then Google isn't claiming to understand meaning. It would be interesting to know how many, if any, of the great search results required human intervention to present so well.
Apparently Google has applied for a patent on their search result list layout. A number of bloggers have written about this, including Phillip Lenssen's Google Blogoscoped blog.
Without access to the patent application, we can only speculate what it is that Google believes is unique in its result list layout. Judging from the image claims to be from the patent application, it looks like what they are claiming as unique may be the multiple result links to locations within a site from the topmost Google result list link. For example, a search for 'Stanford" shows not only the primary site link, but also links to Admissions, Academic Programs, etc.
A patent is only as good as prior artwork. Only time will tell what impact this will have on Search 2.0 innovation.
FAST has announced their FASTforward '07 user conference for February 7 - 9 in San Diego, California.
This year's featured speakers include John Battelle, Ray Lane, Tim O'Reilly and an impressive list of other top names in the industry. FAST has also scheduled a one-day "configuration and customization" training class to be help the day before the conference starts at a discounted price to conference attendees. Details here.