Archive: August 2005Using Spelling SuggestionsBy Yusuf Mohsinally, Your users have probably misspelled a search query on more than one occassion. It shouldn't matter. For example, an employee at a semiconductor company who types in "heaflouroethane" into an intranet search box should be asked if he meant to search for "hexafluoroethane." Similarly, a user in the company's American manufacturing facility who searches for the same compound's "vapor pressure" should be asked if she also wanted to search for the term "vapour pressure", which is found in documents written at the company's R&D lab in the United Kingdom. There's little doubt that spelling suggestions can be enormously helpful to users on your public website or intranet. Ultraseek's spelling suggestions use dynamic context-sensitive algorithms that are based on documents that have been indexed. This means users receive alternate spellings that occur within the document base, which helps if a particular word has been misspelled within the documents themselves. But, to avoid flooding a user with unhelpful suggestions, the suggested term must appear in at least three indexed documents. If you would like to suggest known alternate terms that may be related to the user's search, you can use the thesaurus feature. For example, you may want to suggest the search term "Ultraseek" when a user searches for "Verity". Or, use the QuickLinks feature to provide a link to the "best known" document for a particular search term. Activating/Deactivating Spelling Suggestions To activate (active by default) the spelling suggestion feature for a particular user interface style, select the "Show Spelling Suggestions" checkbox found under the Interface > Query tab in the admin interface.
Posted August 25, 2005 by editor
Got a Story to Share?How are you getting value from Verity Ultraseek? More than 3,500 of the world's most successful organizations use Ultraseek on their intranets and public websites to find relevant information fast. If you are a member of this fast-growing user community and have a story to tell about the unique ways in which you take advantage of Ultraseek, we would like to hear from you. Did Ultraseek's rapid installation help you meet a pressing deadline? Are your users finding relevant information faster with Ultraseek? Has Ultraseek enabled you to free up IT resources to do more elsewhere? We are giving away Ultraseek-branded iPod Shuffles to five customers who submit a story we can use. Other contributors get a Verity Ultraseek t-shirt. So give us the details of how you benefit from Ultraseek, and stay tuned to www.ultraseek.com in the weeks ahead to read about how your peers are implementing better search for the enterprise. Questions? Email: editor@ultraseek.com
Posted August 19, 2005 by editor
Learn About Secure Search with UltraseekBy The Verity Team Is your organization getting the right information into the hands of the right people in a seamless and secure manner? Most large organizations have intranets that are secure with various restrictions to content. The ones with public facing sites, such as banks, have password protected areas for clients, subscribers and other users to access only secure content. Preventing unauthorized access to these areas is crucial. Join Verity for a free webinar to learn more about the value of secure search. Verity's Parag Patkar will review various levels of support for security within Ultraseek and demonstrate how you can give users access to only the content that they are supposed to see, creating new possibilities to support your clients, suppliers and partners. WHAT WHEN: WHO:
Posted August 10, 2005 by editor
Thesaurus versus User DictionaryBy Ryan Weisenberger Manager, Software Development You can also use the <noshow> element if you do not want the term suggested as an alternative, but want it to display the other terms if searched for. After making these changes you'll need to restart Ultraseek. Stemming and the User Dictionary The user dictionary, on the other hand, is used to tell the indexer that two words should be treated the same. While this sounds a lot like synonyms, there is a subtle difference. The user dictionary makes the connection between the terms invisible to the user, so you are in essence tricking them. They think they are searching for one term, but you give them the results from another. This can be a little confusing, and it should not be used instead of the thesaurus. So when should you use the user dictionary? The user dictionary is meant to supplement the linguistic capabilities of Ultraseek. For example, the search engine can automatically map a plural word to its singular form. This way, a search for "geese" will match documents that contain "goose." You may have a word on your site that can be plural, but does not appear in a standard dictionary. A good example of this is a product name. In that case, you can enter the plural form of the word in the user dictionary, along with its singular counterpart, so that Ultraseek knows to treat these words as the same. To add a word to the English user dictionary, edit the en.usr in the /language directory. The correct format is WORD,ROOT:w. The entry below maps the plural of webserver to the correct singular form. webservers,webserver:w After making this change, you must restart Ultraseek, and reindex your content, before you will see it fully take effect.
Posted August 02, 2005 by editor
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