Re: Looking for search engine and reporting tool recommendations

My main advice is to decide what kinds of search you need to support.

Most people in most situations are very happy with simple keyword 
search, they've gotten used to Google, AltaVista, AllTheWeb and so 
on, and just want the same responsiveness and relevance (which is 
hard).  Site search logs show the same short query length as web 
search, about 2.6 words on average.

On web sites, I see a lot of searches for product names, synonyms and 
general topics.  Intranets have an amazing number of searches for 
mundane topics such as vacation policy and lunch menus.  On the other 
hand, I had one client who was an oil exploration company tired of 
miscommunication: a simple keyword search made sure that one office 
never bid against another office again.

It's doing specialized tasks that you need more complex and expensive 
tools.  I've seen reasonable implementations of natural-language 
processing engines in self-service and support systems.  While most 
users have a hard time typing in whole sentences, they are more 
likely to do so in these cases.  And the NLP system can process the 
documents themselves, not just the queries, teasing out related 
terms, usage and grammatical structures.

Other situations include in-depth legal, scientific and medical 
research.  In these cases, complex tools such as NLP, latent semantic 
analysis, Bayesian treatments, clustering, and other forms of content 
analysis can provide significantly better results than simple 
keywords.  As these documents tend to be structured and regular, they 
often find faceted-metadata search a powerful combination of the 
strengths of searching and browsing.

More information on my site at <http://www.searchtools.com> or please 
feel free to contact me directly.

Avi


At 3:57 PM +0100 8/8/03, Enquiries wrote:
>Dear All,
>
>We have just purchased a CMS (Merant Collage) and are about to begin
>implementing it. We are now looking to purchase a third party search engine
>and reporting tool to use in conjunction with the CMS. We have seen a
>presentation from Albert for their natural language search engine and are
>about to view a demonstration of WebTrends' E-Business solution.
>
>I would be very grateful for any links to online articles, recommendations
>for  comparable products to the aforementioned, etc that anybody could give
>me.
>
>Many thanks in advance,
>
>Colin.

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Complete Guide to Search Engines for Web Sites and Intranets
    <http://www.searchtools.com>

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