This month's question comes from Dr. Search himself. Why the heck did the code that worked earlier (Enterprise Search - January 2005) stop working?
Our web content resides within a relational database management system, and we use Ultraseek 5.3 to index the content. Our content creators go to great lengths to assign 'quality' scores to many of the documents to highlight the documents our web marketing staff feels will be more useful to our customers.
Is there a way to use the pre-defined quality value to influence the relevance Ultraseek will assign a document as a result of a query?
Studies show that the average Internet user query is between one and two words in length, which tends to produce many, many results. Some companies have done a better job educating users of their internal search applications, but even within corporations we see short queries as the norm rather than the exception. Although search engine ranking algorithms can help a bit in some situations, there is another more predictable, simple strategy that corporate search engine managers can use: using the available metadata in conjunction with search terms specified by the search user.
In our first newsletter back in 2003, we provided a sample Windows Shell Script program to allow command line searching of Verity K2 collections.
Ultraseek, Verity's other search product line, is thought to be more of a web-based tool with a powerful and friendly browser-based console and search; but using the XPA Java library, you can access Ultraseek collections from within command line programs. This month we will show you how.