Archive: September 2005
'Everything Indexed by Morning'
Jason Cermak, a consultant with Deloitte Consulting, discusses with Ultraseek.com his organization's selection and deployment of Verity Ultraseek at one of Canada's largest oil and gas corporations.
What business challenges prompted you to evaluate Verity Ultraseek?
Deloitte Consulting was hired by a large Canadian oil and gas company to design and implement a corporate portal. This company had an intranet with a freeware search engine that was complex and ineffective. To correct these deficiencies, Deloitte evaluated Ultraseek and selected it as the portal's search engine. We liked the fact that we could actually implement a fully functional search engine while we were evaluating it. Deloitte licensed it for the oil company after 30 days.
Tell us about your Ultraseek implementation experience. How fast did you roll it out?
There was little customization, just some configuration for the spider. The spider was set loose during the night and we had everything indexed by morning (approximately 5,000 entries). Ultraseek was fully functional on the go-live date of the portal.
How is Ultraseek used in your client's organization today?
Ultraseek runs on the internal-facing portal. More than 4,000 employees rely on Ultraseek. Approximately 6,000 search queries are performed every day. There are now approximately 8,000 documents indexed. The volume of information is growing rapidly.
What Ultraseek feature could you not do without? Why?
Key to Ultraseek is its ease of implementation. We faced the challenge recently of moving our client's portal environment to a new server. Verity's online product key generator allowed us to move Ultraseek over without having to re-purchase a new product key. It was no hassle at all.
What has fast, relevant, easy-to-maintain search meant to your client's enterprise?
Users are definitely more satisfied with the search experience that Ultraseek provides. And, with Ultraseek's search statistic reports, we can be more tuned into what users are looking for and modify site navigation/content accordingly.
Do you have a story to share about how your organization is using Ultraseek? Tell us now and win a prize!
Posted September 28, 2005 by editor
Category:
User Stories
'Affordable and Dependable'
Craig Petrou, a Webmaster at PSECU the financial Link, discusses his organization's selection and deployment of Verity Ultraseek on the public website for Pennsylvania's largest credit union.
What business challenges prompted you to evaluate Verity Ultraseek?
We were looking for an affordable and dependable search solution, from an established company that could be incorporated fairly easy into our high-traffic public website (www.psecu.com). Prior to incorporating Verity Ultraseek, visitors would navigate our website using menus, hyperlinks and site maps. Visitors can now search for specific keywords, thus, finding specific information they want and need in a fraction of the time.
Tell us about your Ultraseek implementation experience. How fast did you roll it out?
Implementation of Verity Ultraseek's XML interface was fairly easy to install, set up, integrate and maintain. Although search capabilities were a year end objective, it took less than a week for a Webmaster to incorporate and a Network Support Engineer to install on our development, staging and production servers.
How is Ultraseek used at PSECU?
We are a $2.2 billion credit union serving 300,000 members throughout the world. We use Verity Ultraseek and the Ultraseek Content Classification Engine on our site to help visitors find the information they need about us and the products and services we offer. Our website gets a lot of traffic. We receive one million hits on our site each month. We also integrated Ultraseek into our current Macromedia Flash-based navigational menu and our RightNow customer relationship management system.
What Ultraseek feature could you not do without? Why?
Even though Ultraseek produces great search results out of the box, we like the ability to display specific QuickLink results based upon specific keywords. For example, earlier this year we ran a "beat zero" keyword advertising campaign. By searching for the QuickLink keyword "beat zero", you received a link to a page explaining why it costs more to take an auto manufacturer's 0% APR loan, rather than our 4.99% APR loan with the manufacturer's cash-back rebate. This brought current members, as well as potential members, to our site where we were able to advertised and explain even additional products and services we offer.
What has fast, relevant, easy-to-maintain search meant to PSECU?
At PSECU, we have a self-help philosophy. So, whether you need the most current mortgage rate or advice about setting up payroll direct deposits, we want to help our customers help themselves. Verity Ultraseek enables our visitors and members to find the information they need, when they need it.
Do you have a story to share about how your organization is using Ultraseek? Tell us now and win a prize!
Posted September 19, 2005 by editor
Category:
User Stories
'Administration is a Snap!'
Charles Karnbach, a Senior Web Engineer with United States Department of Justice, discusses his organization's selection and deployment of Verity Ultraseek.
What organizational challenges prompted you to evaluate Verity Ultraseek?
The United States Department of Justice needed a fast, robust, secure, and powerful search engine to replace the one that came standard with our Web server. We researched this choice deeply before making a decision. We had seven vendors from competing companies come and demo their products. Ultraseek was, by far, the most powerful and least expensive application.
Tell us about your Ultraseek implementation experience. How fast did you roll it out?
The rollout was very simple, fast and easy. Within days, we went live on our intranet as well as the intranet servers in 94 Department of Justice district offices across the United States and overseas. With a central server, administration is a snap!
How is Ultraseek used at the U.S. Department of Justice?
It currently indexes about 70,000 documents in a variety of formats including HTML, CFM, PDF, and Word. Over 96 Web servers are being indexed on a single search server. Each district office places a link to their customized search page on our main server. From this link, Department of Justice employees, wherever they are located, can easily access the information they need.
What Ultraseek feature could you not do without? Why?
In our internal surveys, users frequently mention the Ultraseek Search Tips and Examples page as an excellent resource for optimizing their search experience with some of Ultraseek's most advanced features. It helps our users find the information they need faster, rather than turning into trouble tickets on our IT help desk. The man-hours saved are worth tens of thousands of dollars.
What has fast, relevant, easy-to-maintain search meant to the Department of Justice?
More than 9,000 of our users work in the legal area and one of the most important aspects of their jobs is data research. Ultraseek provides an invaluable tool to simplify research. This frees up time for them to perform many of their other tasks. Also, we have been able to save time for over 94 system managers, one at each of our district sites.
Do you have a story to share about how your organization is using Ultraseek? Tell us now and win a prize!
Posted September 13, 2005 by editor
Category:
User Stories
To Stopword or Not to Stopword?
By Greg Jones,
Sr. Software Engineer
Many search engines identify a class of words as "stopwords." These are typically the short, frequently occurring words in a language. Stopwords usually have only a grammatical function within a sentance, and don't add to the meaning. Some examples of stopwords for English are:
the
and
it
is
of
Stopwords include articles, case particles, conjunctions, pronouns, auxiliary verbs, and common prepositions.
How Do Other Search Engines Handle Stopwords?
Some search engines ignore stopwords in queries. There are two reasons why a search engine might ignore stopwords. If the engine requires all query terms to match, it may exclude a document because the stopword did not appear in the document. Even though the stopword is probably irrelevant to what the user is searching for, the document may have actually been a very good result.
If the engine does not require all terms to match, then any document containing the stopword would be included in the results. Since stopwords are very common, this might be nearly every document in the engine's index.
Ignoring Stopwords Can Be a Problem
For example, if a user searches for "vitamin a", the letter "a" will be recognized as a stopword. If the search engine ignores it, then the results will include, and rank similarly, documents about "vitamin A" or "vitamin B" or "vitamin K." Generally, words that have two meanings, one of which is a stopword and one of which is not, create this kind of problem. Another problem can occur if users search for phrases consisting entirely of stopwords. Individual stopwords are not usually meaningful, but phrases of them can be; for example, "to be or not to be".
Ultraseek Does Not Ignore Stopwords
Ultraseek does not need to ignore stopwords. By default, Ultraseek does not require all query terms to match. So if an Ultraseek query contains a stopword, nearly all documents in the index might be returned. However, the numerous documents that don't contain any of the query terms except the stopword will be ranked very low. Ultraseek uses a tf/idf relevance algorithm, which gives little weight to common words. Stopwords are very common words.
What Ultraseek Does Do with Stopwords
Ultraseek uses a list of stopwords for two other purposes. First, Ultraseek does ignore stopwords in the query when highlighting. It would be distracting to to see every occurrence of the highlighted in the results. Secondly, Ultraseek uses the stopword list internally to improve the relevance of phrase searches.
Ultraseek has advanced query handling for queries that contain significant stopwords. For example, Ultraseek will return relevant results for queries like "vitamin a" and "to be or not to be", while other engines may ignore the significant stopwords within those queries. Ultraseek intelligently processes the queries so its results are relevant without requiring users to surround their query with quotation marks to make an explicit phrase search.
Posted September 07, 2005 by editor
Category:
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