Search News & Articles

Facebook and Google just can’t stop one-upping each other. Late last month Google took a small slice of Facebook's pie by tossing their Social Search feature into beta, but this week the popular social network took the upper hand with rumors of a fully featured webmail product.

The Red Herring list of the most impressive worldwide 100 private tech companies features some familiar names to the CMS crowd.

So, Autonomy (news, site) had a pretty good 2009. No surprise there, considering the company ate up every bit of Interwoven around this time last year.

Google has challenged popular networks like Facebook and further blurred the line between social networking and search by graduating their Social Search tool to beta for all Google users.  

Web content management got a lot of attention in 2009. The old way of doing things was declared over and a new way of thinking declared necessary. Many things changed, from the economic environment to the way Web CMS products are being built and deployed.

What we started seeing is that systems can't just slide by with basic functionality, or traditional deployment models. And one of the things we did before skipping out for our holiday break was to talk about the current trends in web content management.

Here's a recap:

• Platform vs Specialization: We are seeing the division of WCM platforms and vendors offering specialized WCM point solutions. We are also having great discussions on the beloved WCM acronym and where its future lies.
• Integration of Web Analytics: The needs to provide engaging user experiences is more important than ever before. But do we really need our analytics solutions to be tightly integrated? The debate is on.
• Tightly Integrated Search: We've always had some kind of search within our WCMs -- or at least we should have -- whether it was part of the solution or third party. But now the move towards tighter integration is upon us.
• Cloud Hosted vs SaaS: The battle for the cloud: is the best approach cloud hosted or SaaS? Some vendors will straddle the fence, while others will stand their ground.
• Integration of Social Media: Lots of social media functionality in WCM systems, a little bit of WCM in social computing apps. Are the two converging? Or just battling for prime time real estate?

You can read the full article Emerging Trends in Web Content Management to get more detail, but we are curious to know:

Document management  provider Speedy Solutions (news, site)  has added a whole pile of new features to its Speedy Organizer document management software, slashed its price to US$ 94 annually for a single license for three PC’s, launched a new website to support the product and put it for sale on Amazon.

In its recent research, CMS Watch (news, site) found that enterprise search buyers are increasingly turning to specialized search vendors, as they struggle to find the right solution.

CMS Watch's Search & Information Access subscription service shows specialized focus in specific environments (Microsoft, SAP, Oracle) or verticals (e.g. Recommind in legal sector).

While evaluating 23 enterprise search vendors (10- to 18-page comparative evaluations per each), the researchers also found that:

• Despite improvements in SharePoint search, Microsoft-focused organizations are still considering other alternatives (Coveo, SurfRay or ISYS).
• Rapidly growing repositories are making enterprise search harder.
• Larger vendors struggle to keep up with specialized search vendors (Sinequa, dtSearch and Vivisimo), who are quickly releasing connectors to various repositories.

The updated Search & Information Access report also looks into FAST, SharePoint search in 2010, Autonomy’s IDOL platform, open source Apache Lucene and Solar, and offers an updated industry "cross-check" chart with 2010 product developments and vendor changes.

You can either get a free sample or buy the full report here.

On most sites, users look to on-site Search after they've scanned the page for clues to the content they're seeking. A quality Search experience is critical to making users happy, yet many teams don't spend nearly enough time looking at that experience.

One place to start is the Search Log. Spending a little quality time with it, on a regular basis, is a great way to learn more about how people use your site.

Many people are perfectly happy working directly with open source as it comes from the project that wrote it. Others prefer a bit more spit and polish. If you're in the second category, you might be interested to know that Lucid Imagination (news, site) has released a new version of its LucidWorks Certified Distribution for Lucene.

What LucidWorks Contains

LucidWorks for Lucene version 2.9.1 is free and includes:

• Apache Lucene 2.9.1
• An upgrade to all of the related utilities
• Version 0.9.9 of Luke, a development and diagnostic tool for working with Lucene indexes
• Additional testing performed by Lucid Imagination
• Additional bug fixes from the current trunk of the Lucene project
• The benefit of Lucid Imagination customer feedback
• Tools from Lucid Imagination to ease both Lucene installation and deployment
• Geographic-based search provided by the new Lucene Spatial contrib module

Why Lucene 2.9.1 Matters

If you haven't looked at Lucene 2.9, you're missing out on advanced numeric search and real-time search performance improvements. Tied together with Lucene Spatial, these additions can allow mobile users to do searches for, say, an Italian restaurant within five miles of where they currently are, and can get useful results thanks to the GPS in their mobile device and Lucene's quick handling of the information.

You can download LucidWorks now.

Yes, we all know web content management (WCM) 1.0 is dead. But we still seem to be having a hard time defining exactly what 2.0 is about. We will continue to grapple with the emerging definition. In the mean time there are emerging trends shaping web content management and the vendors that provide it. Here's a look at what's on our radar.

There's no sign of enterprise content management investment decreasing in the coming year. At least not according to new Forrester (news, site) research.

Not satisfied with scouring the dusty corners of the Internet to quench your search thirst, Google (news, site) goes up-to-the-second with Real Time Content.

A new partnership between Irish enterprise web content management developer pTools (news, site) and document conversion specialist Riverdocs will extend pTools WCM by enabling users to transform PDF’s and Microsoft Office documents into searchable HTML pages.

A new partnership between publishing software giant Woodwing (news, site) and visual search technology developer Imprezzeo (news, site) will add image recognition search capabilities to Woodwing’s enterprise content management system.

A new simple hosted web content management system that has been in private beta for the past three years and which focuses on usability and simplifying processes has just been release by Arizona based Ixpleo.