We are proud to present the first video on our new Vimeo channel. Enjoy!

Successful search project does not only involve technology and having the most skilled developers, it is not enough. To utilise the full potential and receive return on search technology investments there are five main dimensions (or perspectives) that all need to be in focus when developing search solutions, and that require additional competencies to be involved.

This holistic approach to implementing search technology we call Findability by Findwise.

Time is running fast and we are now well into our holiday time at Findwise. Therefore we will take a break over the summer and we’ll see you again in August.

The European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) 2011 took place in Dublin last week, 18-21 April. In this blogpost I would try to highlight some of the papers and talks from the conference which caught my attention and back it up with what other attendees said about it.

First, I was intrigued by the session on evaluation for IR and especially the topic of Croudsourcing. In my opition, the paper A Methodology for Evaluating Aggregated Search Results, which also got the prize for best student paper, was among the most pedagogically presented ones. It deals with the task of incorporating search results from a number of different sources, called verticals, into Web search results. By using a small number of human judgements for a given query the authors present the way to evaluate any possible permutation of verticals in the result presentation. I think that this methodology should be adopted in the world of Enterprise search, since it is exactly there where we crawl, index and present information from a number of different sources – Web, databases, fileshares, etc. The prerequisites are really minimal and low cost but the return value, the user experience, seems quite high.

Amazon Mechanical Turk, or the Artificial Artificial Intelligence, which is the marketplace for Croudsourcing, provides a way for a ridiculously small sum of money to perform evaluation, relevance assessment or any task for which you would need humans to give you some judgements. Leaving aside ethical issues, two papers in the conference presented ways of how you can utilize this service for some IR tasks.

Evgeniy Gabrilovich from Yahoo! Research, who won the Karen Sparck Jones award for 2010, gave a very interesting keynote talk on Computational Advertising. Up to now, it has never struck me how hard advertising in Information Retrieval systems is actually. I liked one of his points on the future of Ads – by using product feeds, one can automatically create product description via Text Summarization and Natural Language Generation and index this, thus avoiding bid words.

Another interesting and very pedagogically presented paper was about the gensim package by Radim Řehůřek. I definitely think we can use it in some of our projects. In general, text categorization and IR for social network were the dominant tracks. In one of the social networks tracks, Oscar Täckström presented a neat way of discovering fine-grained sentiment where some coarse-grained supervision is available. It really hooked me on trying it for any of our customers where sentiment analysis is required.

Thorsten Joachims, the last of the keynote speakers, gave a very inspiring talk on The Value of User Feedback. He put forward the idea of designing retrieval systems for feedback. In stead of just looking at the clicklogs post factum one can think of a system which uses the clicks feedback to learn, thus creating a better ranker for a given query and a given user need. In a single session, we can use click feedback to disambiguate the query and deliver results on the run which are of immediate benefit to the users.

Unfortunately, I guess I could have missed other interesting presentations but with two parallel sessions and several workshops there was a limit to what I could devour. What surprised me though, was that there were very few papers by the industry. We do try to solve exactly the same problems and tackle the same issues as academia. We, at Findwise, have constantly flagged the huge benefit of good, relevant Metadata for the task of achieving better search performace, which was also touched upon in the paper “Topic Classification in Social Media using Metadata from Hyperlinked Objects”.

It was really great to visit Dublin and attent ECIR 2011. It was an inspiring conference and I do believe that at next ECIR we, from Findwise, can be on the podium, sharing our knowledge and hands-on experience on Enterprise search and IR.

Sláinte!

The LDAP connector for Openpipeline is the result of the latest activity at the Findwise development department which makes it easy to make the LDAP structure searchable. As always with a connector, you get direct access to the source which ensures a very efficent indexing and good control over the indexed information.

The LDAP connector has a number of features, some noted below:

• SSL support – Supports LDAP over SSL
• Pagination – LDAP entries can be retrieved in batches if the LDAP server supports the PagedResultControl. This increases performance and reduces memory consumption drastically
• Incremental indexing – If the LDAP server flag each update to an entry with a timestamp, the connector can use this timestamp to only fetch updated entries.
• Delete entries – LDAP entries that has been removed since the last run will be removed from the index
• Attribute specification – Specify what attributes that should be returned for each entry. By only retrieving the attributes you need, performance is increased.

Interested of knowing more about the connector, or do you have any experience you like to share when indexing LDAP directories? Please drop a comment!

Last week Kristian Norling wrote a blog post about how they work with metadata at Västra Götalands Regionen (VGR). In the beginning of his post he states that metadata is boring, but extremely useful. A teacher in statistics that I had in college used to say that statistics is the most boring thing there is. It’s the things that you can do with statistics that makes it really interesting. So I agree with both of them, the metadata (or statistics) in itself is quite boring, but the things you can do with it is what makes it all worth it. The quality and structure of information must also be in focus when creating Findability solutions that aim to provide easy access to all information inside and outside the firewall.

Findwise is currently working on improving our findability solution which is our intranet. When we investigated our own business and user needs we learned that there is a need for a more flexible way of organizing information so it can be found from different entrypoints as well as in different contexts. Therefore one of the things at the heart of our intranet (except the search functionality off course) is metadata. As a fast growing  (and changing) company we find it hard to create and maintain one single information hierarchy that is intuitive and self-evident to all our employees.  Instead we are working with a taxonomy with a simple set of categories and concepts. All content is tagged with what, where and who.

Who describes which people or groups are allowed to see a document. It can be everyone, a single person or a group of people such as the finance department, or a project team. Since knowledge sharing is very important for our organization most of the information is open for everyone to see and use.

Where describes which sites the content should be visible on. A single document can be visible on several sites. So if contact details for a customer is relevant to show on several projects for that customer the same content can be displayed on all the different project sites, without us having to store duplicate versions of the content.

What describes the concepts the content relates to. These concepts include customers, projects, products & competences, information types as well as categories that are created through the means of user generated tagging. This way one single document does not have to belong to one specific site or folder, but can be displayed in several different and all relevant locations on the intranet. Thanks to this use of metadata it is also possible to use the different categories for search and faceted navigation. For example I can view all design specifications from different customer projects that include the concept faceted navigation, or all information about how to work with search analytics with the search platform Autonomy IDOL. The concepts and the information becomes the focus instead of the location where it is stored.

In the first stage this will be done manually as content is added to the intranet. In the future it would also be of interest for us to utilize the same type of service that we developed for VGR, for our own content. But instead of using controlled vocabularies such as MeSH we use our own taxonomy and the power of search technology to suggest or automatically add appropriate customers, projects and categories for a document. A first step in this will probably be to use entity extraction techniques to identify and automatically tag already existing documents with concepts such as customers and search platforms.

We hope to share our experiences from this project with you in the future. In the mean while I recommend that you read Kristian’s post about how they use different types of keyword metadata at VGR.

Being the hosts of “the Search and Findability blog”, we believe it is time to define and explain what Findwise means by these terms and how they relate.

“Findability” is not a new term or concept. As stated on Wikipedia, Peter Morville is often credited for having introduced the term and it is used in different areas related to the quality of being locatable or navigable either in terms of finding information in the digital world or geographical locations.

“Search” is, at least in the world of IT, commonly associated with either Google on the web, or a search box in the corner of the company Intranet or other websites. Most people have positive experiences from searching with Google on the web but rather poor, sometimes even terrible, experiences from searching at company websites and in internal systems and applications.

Simple search box which often provides undesirable results.

The primary focus of Findwise is to improve the experience and benefits from using search technology in the corporate setting. By itself, we don’t believe that the term “Search” or even “Enterprise Search” fully reflects this focus as it limits the scope of search technology to being “just” the search box in the website corner, which often provides undesirable results. From experience, we know that modern search technology can be utilised in multiple ways to fulfil the needs of an organisation to make information accessible both to their employees and customers. The search box is only one way. Therefore, to support and explain our aims and focus in relation to search technology, we have defined the concept of “Findability by Findwise”.

Findability by Findwise expands the area of search and value of search technology by taking a holistic approach to the challenge of creating business value from internal and external information assets. Findability by Findwise is all about maximising the customer business value gained from search technology investments. Making sure that search technology is implemented and utilised to best support and strengthen the business processes and help the organisation to reach its business goals.

The value generated by the Findability solution could be both:

• Internal; Improving employee efficiency and their ability to truly benefit from existing information assets and previous investments in various systems to store and structure information.
• External; Making sure stakeholders can access the information they need in order to become or remain profitable customers.

From the statement above, it is easy to understand that to gain the desired effects and value of search technology investments, it is not enough only to focus on and master the actual technology. Or as stated in an AIIM report from 2008:

“Findability is more about a well-defined and executed strategy model than it is about technology.”

AIIM Market IQ Intelligence Quarterly Q2 2008

Therefore, a Findability solution by Findwise creates true customer business value, i.e. it makes desired information accessible to internal or external stakeholders, by;

BOTH using the full potential of search technology,
AND focusing on the four other critical dimensions of Findability:

• Business - The use of search technology should support and leverage the existing business processes.

• Users - The solution must be designed and tailored to fit the needs and capabilities of the users.

• Information - The quality and structure of existing and newly produced information is an important success factor of the solution.

• Organisation - The organisation must establish a process to govern the solution and maintain Findability for future needs.

We have chosen the symbol of a flower to illustrate the concept and dimensions of Findability by Findwise:

In other words, the beauty and health of the Findability Flower™ can be likened to the extent to which search technology is utilised to support and leverage the organisation’s business needs and goals. That is what Findability by Findwise is all about.

Visit our website to read more about Findability by Findwise and how we work to create Findability solutions that make our customers truly benefit from state-of-the-art search technology.

As some of you already know, Findwise has been blogging at findwise.se for several years now. However, we thought it was time to separate the blog from our web site and create a forum especially dedicated to the exciting area of findability. From Findwise perspective, findability is the art of making information easy to find by using (enterprise) search technology, this regardless of when the information is needed or where it may be stored.

Here we invite you to learn more about findability and we welcome you to give us feedback and keep a dialogue with us. We will, among other things, keep you updated on relevant research within the findability area, exciting search functionality and news about enterprise search vendors.

Our new blog includes features that were not available in our previous blog. These are: rss subscription, Findwise Twitter feed and the possibility to share information via other social medias. We hope and believe our readers will appreciate these features and we are looking forward to discussing findability and search with you!