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Socialtext Updates Search, Goes Kino

Socialtext, which recently launched offline wiki Socialtext Unplugged at Le Web 3 in Paris, upgraded its search engine over New Years. This upgrade improves upon its already rather luxe professional-quality search function.

While advanced search features like title and tag search have not been touched, the revamped engine is now able to perform the following functions:

• locate alphanumeric strings, part numbers, symbols and version numbers
• stem from a root word, known as stemming in search lingo, or in other words searching for “educate” may also bring up results for “educated” and “educating”
• conduct reliable searches for UTF-8 character sets, like Japanese and Chinese
• search and index far more quickly

Socialtext has shucked its old search technology in favor of KinoSearch, which is everything its predecessor was and more. KinoSearch is a lot like Lucene in that it is loosely based on the Apache’s project’s Lucence search engine, but is a Perl and C derivative. KinoSearch author, Marvin Humphrey, freely boasts KinoSearch’s superiority to Lucene, and he may be well within rights, considering that he’s spent most of his waking life devoted to streamlining KinoSearch’s utility and performance.

Palo Alto, CA-based Socialtext, Inc. focuses primarily on enterprise wikis as well as other types of enterprise social software for collaboration. Socialtext is being bundled as part of the Intel-branded SuiteTwo, announced in late 2006. From its inception in 2002 over 2000 organizations have joined the Socialtext network. Investors include Draper Fisher Jurvetson, SAP, and Omidyar.

Read more on Socialtext at their handy-dandy blog.