Printer Friendly Version

Corporations spent a great deal of time over the last 10 years creating digital content and building intranets, portals, and repositories to store it all. Throw in departmental efforts, a merger or acquisition or two, and now no one can find anything.

"The biggest problem we heard over and over again at the [KMWorld & Intranets] show last week was 'We have all of these intranets and we can't find anything,'" said Kathy Bentaieb, director of corporate marketing at Inxight Software, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based enterprise search vendor.

Inxight is a PARC spinoff, which means it shares its DNA with a number of technology innovations that came out of PARC, the original home of Xerox research — laser printing, thin-screen displays, the GUI, and artificial intelligence, to name just a few. Inxight specializes in text analysis and federated search, but the latest version of its SmartDiscovery Awareness Server, version 5.4, goes beyond basic keyword search. When used with Inxight's SmartDiscovery Analysis Server, entity extraction enables users to see relationships and patterns in their search results.

Awareness Server 5.4 will search any number of internal and external sources and then cluster and filter the results by the most relevant people, companies, concepts, places, and other entities. Inxight does this by employing a team of linguists that designed the software to understand the pieces of speech in 31 different languages. Awareness Server reads the document and comes to conclusions like: two proper nouns next to each other might be a person's name, two proper nouns with a comma in between is likely a location, and so on.

The entity search doesn't require the use of lists, but you can feed lists of names and words to watch for into the system. In addition to entity search, Awareness Server also offers an alerting capability that lets it watch specific pages for changes, names, or places and send out alerts.

Such sophisticated search options have found a home in the government, military, and security industries where it can be used to track relationhips between people and places. Inxight recently announced a $1.7 million contract with the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) for its ThingFinder software and opened an office in Northern Virginia to support its government sales efforts.

Awareness Server has several applications in the enterprise, however. In addition to government, other verticals where Inxight has found a niche include consumer goods, manufacturing, and media companies. It can be used for competitive analysis, tracking competitors' products and Web sites; pharmaceutical researchers can use it to research patent information; and salespeople can use it to find information that already exists in their orgaization to develop a presentation.

In addition to searching enterprise intranets and repositories, Awareness Server will search deep Web sources, such as patent databases and SEC filings; public Web sites in a variety of subject areas; and subscription-only sources. There are more than 600 sources available out of the box. New Web sources can be added using a GUI-based process.

Awareness Server can be used to extend the investment in a Google Search Appliance, according to Inxight. Users can include their Google index in their list of sources to be searched, thereby adding the entity clustering and alerting capabilities of Awareness Server.

Unlike Google's Search Appliance, Inxight's Awareness Server has no document limits, which means customers that use both Google and Awareness Server can choose to index only certain information with Google and use Awareness Server to access what's left. Each database record in a relational database counts as a document toward Google's pricing. Inxight charges by the serve and number of users.

Awareness Server is based on technology acquired from Intelliseek, where it was called Enterprise Discovery Suite, in the spring. In August, Inxight shipped version 5.2, which added Inxight branding to the product.

Entity extraction clusters the most important names, places, and concepts within search results.

Printer Friendly Version

Other Resources

from Intranet Journal

Intranet Journal Discussion Forum Enterprise Search Gets Refined in ISYS:web 7 An Alternative for Search and Knowledge Management

from JupiterWeb

Enterprise Search Engine Technology Strikes Gold (Datamation) Enterprise Search: A Different Animal (EarthWebNews)

from the Web

Inxight Software PARC