Three interesting new search tools

It's impossible to cover content management without paying attention to search technologies. Search after all is what enables you to find that carefully crafted content after you deposit it in the content repository. I'm not sure that most people truly understand the importance of search in the equation, but if you can't find it doesn't exist, right?

That's why this week I want to look at three exciting new search technologies. Each of these search tools could have some impact on search in the enterprise, certainly for knowledge workers because they provide ways, not only to find information, but to use it and understand it in interesting ways.

Google gives you the power to search public data

Google announced [1] yesterday on the Official Google Blog (so you know it's official) that they were launching a new service for analyzing public data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau. Businesses have always had open access to this public data, but what Google has done is put the power of search and visualization behind it. This gives you the power to add or remove data, see trends you might not have seen looking at raw data, and even save the graph as a public link.

Newssift gives you a different look at the news

Every day businesses have to process so much news. RSS can help by pushing the news that matters to you, but if you follow a number of sources, even if it's organized it can be overwhelming. That's where Newssift [2] comes in. It monitors thousands of news sources and lets you enter a search term or select one of the pre-defined terms on the home page. The results you see are a list of news stories sorted by relevance for the last month. You can change the time frame easily from a drop-down box. What makes this even more interesting, however is the information in the sidebar which includes graphs on sentiment ranking (how did readers feel about this article), names, locations and much more. You can drill down into the results by clicking on information in the sidebar item giving you a way to naturally build a faceted search.

The Search engine is built on Endeca's latest search technology [3] called McKinley, which was released last month and shows how you can use search technology to build applications to find the information that matters to your organization, rather than relying on a search tool and trying to make it conform to your needs.

Wolfram Alpha: Lots of promise, lots of hype

The next big thing in search is the much-anticapted Wolfram Alpha [4], which is due for release in May. The search engine is the brain child of Stephen Wolfram, the mathematical genius behind the Mathematica [5] program. A recent ReadWriteWeb post [6] reports on a one hour demo they received. According to the post, the program uses data from a "vast repository of curated data from public and licensed sources." Using this repository as a basis, users can build all kinds of interesting searches using natural language queries. Until I see this in action, it's hard for me to picture, but it is supposed to make connections and find data using queries that wouldn't necessarily work in Google.

This has lots of promise for business users (especially since there will be a professional version), but it's always difficult to sort hype from fact without using it first.

The great thing about these three search technologies is that it's possible your employees could be using these search technologies today (or soon), and it's likely that they could be leading the way to new and more exciting search solutions in the future--because if you can't find it, you can't use it. - Ron [7]