We have some groovy users that post neat stuff they've figured out in the forums. From time to time I'll highlight what they've shared when I think that it is something that will potentially help out a lot of people.

This one, shared by Adrian Nicolaiev caught my eye:

Adrian provides the XML file that you need to update with your own server's information and save as a file in your Firefox search plugins directory. This then allows you to search your own OmniFind Yahoo! Edition search server from the toolbar in Firefox just like you search the web search engines.

Neat trick. I like it.

Yo, Adrian! (I couldn't resist) Thanks!
Sean
Chapel Hill, NC

I am happy to announce the general availability of the third release of OmniFind Yahoo! Edition, version 8.4.2. The previous release was focused on addressing bugs and adding some fit and finish but this release is all about some big new capabilities that you have been asking for. We've tried really hard to maintain the unprecedented ease of use of the prior releases while delivering a much more powerful search engine. Go to the download page to get the new release and let us know if we succeeded.

Version 8.4.2 continues our mantra of a three click install. If you are a user of version 8.4.1, it installs right over top of your existing installation and preserves all of your configuration and your document index.

My favorite new capability in this release is multiple collections. You can now configure up to 5 different collections of documents that can be searched independently. With collections you can partition your data for search however you'd like. This has been the single most requested feature in my discussions with users and I am happy that we now have it in the product.

And here is how it might look to a searcher:

Also new in this release is custom extensible meta-data fields. This means you can define your own fields in the index. Populate them via HTML meta tags, extracted document meta-data, or directly through the push API, and then search your custom fields. Not everyone needs this capability but those that do need it need it badly and we've seen users jump through incredible hoops to hack this capability into the fixed meta-data search support we offered previously. Coders, put away your hacks! We now have this built in.

Another area that required a little too much hacking about was getting OmniFind Yahoo! Edition to run as a Microsoft Windows service. No longer. Just check the box in the installer that says you want OmniFind Yahoo! Edition to run on startup and you have a Windows service that you can manage just like any other.

The last item I want to mention is that we've added result click through tracking which gives you much more powerful reporting capabilities. You have two additional reports that tell you what the most clicked search result is and what searches most often result in no clicks. Searches without a result being clicked often means you don't have the content that users are looking for and can also alert you to cases where you may need to setup some synonyms or featured links in the search engine to guide users to the content.

There are also some newly resolved bugs. Many of these were reported by users in the forums. Like all feedback, we really appreciate the bug reports. It takes some effort to describe the bug and to help us replicate it but please keep those bug reports coming. They help us make the product better for you. To see if your least favorite bug has been resolved, check the change log.

The build of the software that ended up being the generally available release was build 827. This is 327 builds since the last release. That number represents an incredible amount of work by the development, quality assurance, information development and user centered design teams. I salute these folks again.

You can view the change log for the details on all the new features and bug fixes.

Sean
Chapel Hill, NC

Yesterday Microsoft announced a pair of low-cost enterprise search products, Search Server 2008 and Search Server Express 2008. The Express edition is freely available immediately as a release candidate and according to Microsoft, both products will be released in the first half of next year.

Like most of us, I am pressed for time these days, so I took the easy way out and searched the Web for a welcome letter template that I could use to welcome Microsoft to the market. I found this PDF here which I think will do the job nicely.

I'm happy to report that besides our own humble efforts here with OmniFind Yahoo! Edition for enterprise search, IBM has also provided another search treat to the world at no charge. OmniFind Personal Email Search is a new email search tool born out of work within IBM Research in the area of text analysis and semantic search.

Made available last week on alphaWorks, IBM OmniFind Personal Email Search installs on your desktop or laptop computer running Windows. It indexes all your email in Outlook or Lotus Notes and makes it available for quick and accurate searching. The difference between OmniFind Personal Email Search and however you might be searching your email today is in the semantics. Unlike traditional search engines which only look for word matches with at best some word stemming and synonyms applied, this semantic search engine understands how people use key concepts in email such as people, organizations, phone numbers, and it is configurable so you can teach it new semantic rules.

Let's say you were looking for my phone number and you suspected that at some point I'd sent it to you in an email. With traditional text search, you'd conduct searches on things like "Sean Johnson phone" or "Sean number" and you might get lucky since maybe those terms did appear in my email. But you'd also miss the answer if my number was only in my email signature and I'd never used the words "phone" or "number". Maybe I never sent you an email at all, maybe Jake sent you an email that said, "Call Sean at home tomorrow at 555-555-5555." There are also red herrings to worry about; perhaps I never did send you my phone number but instead I did reply to a message from Jake in which he had said, "My cell is 777-777-7777." The text analysis in OmniFind Personal Email Search is finely tuned to the nuances of email and would find the right results to these queries by identifying the entities in the email so that they are then available to the search that leverages those semantics.

If you use Outlook or Lotus Notes then do yourself a favor and head on over to alphaWorks and install this puppy and let me know what you think about it here in comments or on the forums. Does it help you search your email better? Would you like to see this kind of semantic search in OmniFind Yahoo! Edition? Is IBM barking up the right tree by applying this kind of text analytics technology broadly in our content discovery products?

Sean Johnson
Chapel Hill, NC