Search News & Articles

Endeca (news, site), the search applications company that kicked out an Information Access platform earlier this year, is stepping it up a notch.

Through the expansion of their Extend Partner Program, Endeca hopes customers will find it easier to integrate text analytics with said platform. On board with their endeavor is a name our readership might me more familiar with: Nstein.

Success on the Web is not about making customers do what you want. It is about helping customers do what they want.

Mid-March we saw the first official release of Microsoft's new ASP.NET MVC (news, site) framework. The alternative to Web Forms when developing ASP.NET applications has been well received and talked about frequently.

Work on ASP.NET MVC 2 started almost immediately and we saw the first preview of that version mid-August. MVC 2 Preview 1 included things like template helpers, areas and built-in support for data annotations.

But that was only the start of the work for ASP.NET MVC 2. And now a second preview has been released with even more functionality such as:

• Client Side Validation: New support for jQuery validation (here's a good example of this functionality on Pietro Brambati's blog)
• Areas: Support for areas in a single project
• Model Validation Providers: The ability to hook in model validation providers other than the default Data Annotations
• Metadata Providers: The ability to hook in other metadata providers, the default being Data Annotations
• Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2: A set of HTML code snippets for MVC 2 Preview 2

Along with new features, there were also a number of changes made to existing types and members and a few bug fixes.

The version of ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 2 that you can download and use now works for Visual Studio 2008 SP1.

To see the Visual Studio 2010 HTML code snippets you'll have to wait for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 (MVC will be included in the beta).

Get more details on Phil Haack's blog and the official ASP.NET MVC website.

A recent IDC research report shows Autonomy (news, site) is leading the search and discovery market in terms of both revenues and market share.

Exalead (news, site) announced that their CloudView Search Platform has received the "Designed for EMC (news, site) Documentum" accreditation.

Accreditation comes after participation in the Designed for EMC process, which helps ISVs, VSPs and SIs design, develop and market successful offerings based on the EMC Documentum platform.

Apache Lucene (news, site), the popular open source search engine, is now available in version 2.9.0. This version is the last minor release before the big step to Lucene 3.0, but the developers didn't hold back all of their improvements for later.

Let them eat cake! Someone special celebrated a birthday over the weekend, and if you used the largest search engine in the world on Sunday it's likely that you saw their homage to themselves. 

Google changes things up when  they see fit, including their logo--in most recent times it was adorned with crop circles in celebration of H.G. Wells' birthday, and today it features an illustration of Confucius for what would be his 2,560th--and their date of birth. Last year the search giants reportedly posted their 10th birthday logo on September 2nd, so you can imagine the confusion that spread when their simple logo featured an extra "l" on Sunday the 27th.

If you check out Google's FAQ section, you'll find some reasoning behind the inconsistency: “Google opened its doors in September 1998. The exact date when we celebrate our birthday has moved around over the years, depending on when people feel like having cake.”

Sounds like reason enough, right?  Besides, cake is good any day of the week.

Continue the celebration by reminiscing with us over Google's history, sharing your related thoughts in the comments section below, or by checking out their latest developments and blurbs. 

Improving developer culture is kind of a hot ticket right now, and extra focus on the cogs of that has been apparent in recent months from platforms like EMC, Joomla! and Plone.

Real time search startup OneRiot (news, site) cut themselves a slice of the action this week by launching the OneRiot Developer Network (ORDN). Acting as a watering hole, the new meeting place will serve as an excellent starting point for third party developers, sustaining those with important API questions, or those who just want to connect/start a specific conversation. 

OneRiot Developer Network

Leading the project is Robert Reich, co-founder of OneRiot. Considering the fact that the last time Reich had his hands in a community it went on to become the third largest meet-up in the country, we think it's fair to assume a lot of people are expecting great things from the new network.

Remember SurfRay? They acquired search provider Mondosoft back in 2007 and at the same time made Ontonlica Search a separate product.

Ontolica is a search solution for SharePoint and Surfray has just announced the latest version.

Interactive Knowledge Stack (news, site) has a new workshop planned for November 12 in Rome, Italy to discuss what is needed for its proposed semantic open-source CMS framework.

The IKS project started at the beginning of 2009 with the big idea of creating semantic features for CMS companies to benefit small to midsize businesses. Sponsored by the European Union and partnering with several universities, research outfits and software companies, it will use the upcoming workshop to gain ideas and insight into what users want.

The €6.5 million project will then convert those lessons and information into the Interactive Knowledge Stack. This software stack of techniques, components and specifications will help existing and future CMS products work with semantic search, as and when it becomes a requirement of CMS tools.

The workshop is looking for insight from those in the CMS space, particularly vendors, users, open source developers and others who can help shape development of the IKS. To catch up on the latest results from the project, you can check out the site's blog to see what happened at the first workshop in Salzburg and who was there (including representatives from Plone, Drupal and Jahia), and also catch up on the latest developments.

The two questions being asked in Rome: What exists in terms of search tools that can be developed further? And, what kind of information will we expect from CMS?

If you have an opinion then why not join up and venture it to the team?

No longer rumored in the halls of the ILTA conference, the intent of Enterprise CMS and storage vendor EMC (news, site) to acquire Kazeon (news, site) is now official. The unconfirmed deal size is at about US$ 75 million.

What does that mean for the two companies? How did the eDiscovery industry take the news? Let’s take a look at some first reactions and thoughts.

Danish company Forward gets funding from local venture companies to boost development of its Forward Search platform for regional territories.

Forward Search is an internet, intranet and ecommerce search tool that is making waves in its local territories. The company was founded in 2004 and has made steady progress with its software, currently at version 1.6. They have built partnerships and signed deals with the likes of Carlsberg and Lego, and particularly with Sitecore CMS customers.

Based on .NET and a Web Services architecture, Forward Search is compatible with all .NET Web CMS systems. Foward features multi-threaded crawling for fast indexing that can be done in real time or scheduled by the admin. The search box itself can be added into existing Web pages or Web Services API can be used for other integration.

Connectors are available for data resources in SharePoint, SQL, HTTP and Office.

Forward offers a business-like front end that supports a range of queries including natural language, boolean, fuzzy and custom fields.  It can search by meta data and by context, and can search up to a terabyte of unstructured data. The search engine is available for Danish, English (both U.S. and U.K.) and German languages, with Unicode support for others.

Available in in four editions; Standard, Pro, Corporate and Enterprise, there are limits on the number of domains and access up to the Enterprise version which offers unlimited access.

The investment will help drive development and sales expansion and sees a former HP Nordic director, Christian Nejstgaard, join the board.

Lucid Imagination (news, site) continues to show its (mainly dollar-amount-driven) support for open source Apache Lucene and Solr search technologies.

Recently, the company released a nifty (oh, and free) monitoring, performance and optimization tool called LucidGaze for Lucene.

Helping Microsoft put a little bit of social search goodness in its Internet Explorer 8 must have helped OneRiot (news, site) garner a little more attention.

The real time web search startup has just picked up some Series C financing to the tune of US$ 7 million. The funding was led by OneRiot's current venture capital firms: Appian Ventures, Commonwealth Capital Ventures and Spark Capital.

The plans for this new funding involve continual enhancement of the OneRiot core product, in addition to efforts to support partners like Microsoft and Yahoo who use the OneRiot API.

The OneRiot Hot Web Topics Internet Explorer 8 add-on is an IE8 web slice offering real time web search results on the most discussed topics on the social web.

With over 3 millions users opted in to share their information with OneRiot, they are able to provide the hottest topics currently being discussed via sites like Twitter and Digg. It does this using their PulseRank algorithm which determines the current social buzz on web content mentioned within these social services -- based on their community.

OneRiot real time web search

Obviously OneRiot must be doing something right to get their venture capital firms to cough up more money for development. As they say on their blog, "Yes, we're really happy about this."

As Microsoft's Bing (news, site) tries to build up its brand, it jumps ship to those pesky Apple formats in the aim for universal appeal.

Why are Firefox, GoogleMail and Apache such successful products? One, grossly simplistic answer is that they are not owned by Microsoft. Which is why it's just "Bing" and not "Microsoft Bing" or "Bing [click here to read license agreement before use]".

Bing, while still in its early stages of life, has done pretty well gaining interest and usage from the online community. However, Microsoft wants to get away from just the desktop browser space and is spreading itself in all directions to get more people using the search service.

So, now we have a Bing SDK in Cocoa Framework for Mac and iPhone developers, allowing them to easily add Bing search functions to their apps.

Now, while there may be some Mac developers out there who would consider using a Microsoft product as some sort of deal with the Devil, there are plenty of others who will appreciate that Bing is fresh and new compared to older search properties like Yahoo! and Google.

Licensed under the Microsoft open source Public License, it offers searching on Web, video, image and phonebook data. Searches can be handled synchronously or asynchronously.

The SDK is available on CodePlex and is approaching nearly 1,000 downloads after a couple of days.