Search News & Articles

While most of North America was fast asleep, Lucid Imagination kicked-off the first sessions its annual European conference, Apache Lucence EuroCon. Hundreds of attendees have converged in Barcelona, Spain to learn from Solr experts, compare notes with peers and maybe find a little fun outside of the search conference hours.

Today Oracle announced that it has entered into an agreement to buy Endeca, a privately held company that provides unstructured data management, web commerce, and business intelligence (BI) solutions. 

Open-source enterprise CMS platform provider Nuxeo is enhancing its cloud offerings. The company announced the release of its cloud-based enterprise CMS product that allows customers to go from development and configuration through production in the cloud.

The team behind Bit.ly, a popular link shortener, has been diligently working on turning its giant collection of link data into valuable offerings. Yesterday, it announced the beta launch of two of them: a search platform and reputation monitoring service specifically for "viral" content.

While the workforce is increasingly occupied with knowledge work, it is not seen nearly as business critical as production or service delivery. For this reason, many knowledge workers have had to put up with poorly designed enterprise digital services. Executives and decision-makers must learn that “good enough” is just not good enough when it comes to designing digital services for enterprise use.

Having just had Google+ inadvertently slated in public by one of its own, Google's developers are still pushing out new features to the fledgling social service while Larry Page discussed it at length in a Google call.

For the last few months I have been working on a project for the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (an agency of the European Commission) to prepare a techno-economic assessment of the enterprise search industry and market in Europe. I’m not in a position to disclose the outcomes of the project, but in the course of the research I did examine how organizations went about selecting an enterprise search solution, and looked at the websites of around 60 vendors. At the same time I was working on an intranet strategy project for a European company with over 40,000 employees world-wide and no enterprise search capability! In this column I’ve summarized some of my conclusions from these two projects.

This week the Google-verse provided fans with Google Cloud SQL, a Twitter-esque feature in Plus, and better options for UN-sharing. 

Lucid Imagination has announced the latest version of its commercially supported Lucene/Solr distribution, LucidWorks Platform 2.0. The release is squarely focused on putting open-source search inside the enterprise, and despite what you may have heard, Lucid Imagination wants to make it clear it is not an enterprise search vendor.

Socially-curated news reader apps are now becoming the choice method of accessing news content on tablets like the iPad. With magazine-like looks and touch-friendly interfaces, apps like Flipboard, Zite, Pulse and even the upcoming Google Propeller give a social aspect to reading news and interesting feature stories online. Joining the mix is Evri, a mobile app developer that will debut its iPad application today.

Social media strategists are often separated from the SEO and web teams. This is unfortunate because they seek the same goals -- awareness of the website and engagement with the audience. SEO has evolved as a sophisticated but largely separate discipline from social media and community development. As a result the social media strategist is often left out of the loop when it comes to SEO best practices.

With news that Microsoft has spent US$ 5.5 billion on its Bing search engine, those using its new 'action buttons' might wonder where the money has gone.

So where were we? In the first article of this series, What You Need To Know About iOS and Android, we decided that the wise publisher currently targets iOS first and Android second. In a second article, Data Formats for Fixed and Flowable Content, we agreed that HTML is the sensible way to expose a publisher’s content to the world. Today we’ll talk about how we take this content and create wonderful tablet apps.

SEO strategists can no longer ignore the impact of social media. Gone are the days when meta tag keywords and a smattering of comments on competitive blogs would boost search rankings. In short, social media and SEO are a match-made for giving traditional cross channel marketing efforts a badly needed boost.

The growth and acceptance of social media and Enterprise 2.0 technology has shifted customer expectations for company interaction. Inside the walls of the business, these shifts are bringing together two groups that have often remained separate. SEO strategists traditionally focused on gaining company awareness are now coming together with social media experts to better understand the impact of social media on SEO. Both realms stand to benefit. SEO teams gain awareness amplification when the social teams are most effective. And the social media teams enjoy boosted engagement and conversation participation when highly effective SEO teams bring new audiences into the social media engagement spaces.