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Specializing in Enterprise Search since 1996 - including FAST, Autonomy IDOL, K2, and Ultraseek, OmniFind and Lucene

Locator: NIE Home / Publications / Enterprise Search Newsletter / Issue 9 / What's New

What's New

Issue 9 - June 2004

NIE's Miles Kehoe to Chair Silicon Valley Webguild's
(www.webguild.org) Content Management SIG

If you are based in Silicon Valley, you will be glad to hear that New Idea Engineering, Inc. has reached an agreement with the Silicon Valley Webguild to help organize the content management Special Interest Group. July 14, starting at 6pm there is a great doubleheader: .

Jared Spool http://www.webguild.org/biography/JSpool.php speaking on "14 Things Users Want to Know," a framework to create your own content project plans and ensure that you answer all the questions users have.

Miles Kehoe, CEO of New Idea Engineering, Inc. offers practical tips for tuning and configuring the presentation of results from your enterprise search engine so that visitors and employees are able to quickly and easily access the best documents for their needs. His talk is titled "Top 10 Tips for Better Search Results Improving the Presentation and Usefulness of Your Website".

For directions and information, check http://www.webguild.org/meetings/directions.php.

New Approach to Search Results

A relatively new company offers a very interesting new way to search the web. A9 (http://a9.com) is the search engine front-end from Amazon, based on the Google search index.

A9 lets you view different search results in different panels, showing Google results in one pane, with book results in a second pane. A9 shows your previous A9 searches in a third pane, and includes the ability to view and manage your previous searches. This is a great solution to a common problem: you spend an hour trying to create a search that gives you the results you want on Google; find the perfect site; but forget to bookmark it. With your prior searches available, you can get back to the site with minimum fuss.

The content at A9 is Google and Amazon; but the paradigm of providing different result list views is a first step towards making search results more useful to mere mortals.

Open Source Web Engine Project

Federated search is one way to present your users with an integrated search across multiple sites and engines. Now, the open source Nutch project ( http://www.nutch.org/) gives you the tools to build your own search portal aimed at the (pardon the pun) niche that makes sense for you and your employees.

Based on Lucene, Nutch includes a spider, a flexible query language, and link analysis for multi-site search relevance. Where Lucene is generally a search tool for single sites, Nutch is the toolkit to create your own Google.

Read about Nutch at

http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3071971

http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&=144&page=1

Would Google work for your Site?

Search philosopher Tim Bray writes about search relevancy, and questions whether Google's popular link algorithm is appropriate for corporate/site search.

Read more at http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/11/13/ResultRanking.

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