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If your intranet is loaded with helpful information, the next hurdle is making sure that your fellow employees can find it. A standard search box will do for smaller sites, but doesn't begin to fill the needs of enterprise-sized giants. What about those PowerPoint presentations stored on your intranet? Will your search find those? Will it help users find exactly the terms they're looking for in longer documents? For time-saving features like these, you'll need a powerhouse search tool, like Verity Ultraseek.

Recently upgraded to version 5.2, Ultraseek now has a simplified Web Services interface that makes it easy to integrate with existing applications. Setting it up to work with portals or content management systems like Vignette, TIBCO, or WebSphere takes far less programming knowledge.

This new version also improves a highlighting feature introduced in version 5.1. Previously, Ultraseek could be set to highlight search terms in HTML or PDF documents, so that if you were searching for a particular company, for example, you could quickly find where the company was mentioned. But now the highlighting has been improved so that it works with just about any format you might have connected to your intranet, including Word, PowerPoint, WordPerfect, XML, and WordPro.

This latest version also provides an easy upgrade path for older users of Verity's Information Server. A wizard included with 5.2 does all the work of converting to the new system, providing users with the benefits of Ultraseek in the hour or two that it takes the search engine to spider their site.

Simply Excellent Searching

For those not familiar with Ultraseek, it provides sophisticated search tools for intranet and Internet sites, with no hassle or difficult setup. The product can be downloaded from Verity's site and comes with a 30-day trial. Administrators specify what parts of the site should be indexed and what parts are off-limits. They can even set permissions on various parts of the site, so that employees need to log in before running a search, and then can only see the correct results for their permission level.

If your search logs show that people are using vague search terms and then not finding the results they want — perhaps searching on "human resources," but then getting lost in a sea of irrelevant forms — you can use Ultraseek to create pre-loaded results for those searches. Then, instead of getting confusing results, your users will get a helpful page directing them to various parts of the human resources site. It's a feature not found in many search tools.

It's the advanced spidering, though, that we find most useful. Any search tool will index all of your HTML pages, but intranets are often made up a huge variety of file types and your users should be able to find those easily, as well. Ultraseek can search within just about any file you have, including all common office applications.

Test the 30-day free trial to see what Ultraseek can bring to your company. When you're ready to buy, call for a license key; there's nothing more to install. Prices start at less than $10,000, with the actual cost based on the number of pages indexed. Users have the option of paying a 20 percent yearly fee for maintenance, phone support, and automatic access to new versions.

Verity Ultraseek 5.2 automatically highlights query terms within documents.