Archive: October 2005
Does Your Search Engine Need a Relevance Tune-Up?
WHAT: Verity Webinar
Does Your Search Engine Need a Relevance Tune-Up?
WHEN: Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2005
10:00 am PT / 1:00 pm ET
WHO: Jon Bice, Sr. Systems Engineer, Verity, Inc.
REGISTER NOW!
Websites and intranets with business content usually benefit from some tuning to narrowly focus result lists. Similarly, different users or businesses may require different features to be turned on or off.
The administrative interfaces of Verity Ultraseek make this as easy as possible.
Verity Ultraseek's search results can be tuned to match information structure and end-user needs with relevance tuning options that deliver comprehensive control over the relative weighting of metadata fields.
Join Verity's Jon Bice and learn how to tune your installation of Verity Ultraseek so that you can use external metadata to:
- Dramatically increase the success and relevance of your business search
- Override poor or non-existent titles and descriptions with meaningful ones
- Filter results lists on external key/value pairs honing in on specific content quickly
Posted October 27, 2005 by editor
Category:
'Better Search Results'
Rick Sleppy, Webmaster for Engenio Information Technologies, discusses his company's selection and deployment of Verity Ultraseek on www.engenio.com.
What business challenges prompted you to evaluate Verity Ultraseek?
At the recommendation of our Web design firm, we implemented a low-end search solution when we initially launched our website about a year ago. Our intent was to upgrade to a more robust solution in the coming year. But, when we went live with our new website it became painfully obvious that users were not finding our search solution adequate. We saw a large number of visitors exit our site from search queries because the search results were so poor. The adage "you get what you pay for" sure rang true in this case.
Our parent company, LSI Logic, was very high on Ultraseek, having used the solution for several years. We naturally put Ultraseek at the top of our list when we looked for a new, robust solution to replace our corner-cutting alternative. If we had to do it all over again, we would have implemented Ultraseek from the beginning to spare ourselves from losing repeat traffic to our website.
Tell us about your Ultraseek implementation experience. How fast did you roll it out?
Rolling our Ultraseek was fairly simple. Our Web administrator, who had no experience installing a search solution previously, had no trouble figuring out how to implement Ultraseek. With minimal resources dedicated to the implementation, Engenio rolled out the new search engine in about a month. However, if it wasn't for the very complex Web design built into the search results page, we would have been able to launch Ultraseek in a week or so as the setup required very little time at all.
How is Ultraseek used at Engenio Information Technologies?
We use Ultraseek on our public website, www.engenio.com. Our site averages approximately 100 search queries a day. We have nearly 1,000 Web pages and/or documents indexed and Ultraseek handles our website effortlessly.
What Ultraseek feature could you not do without? Why?
There isn't one feature that stands out as being more important than others. I have a hard time seeing Ultraseek as a feature set, but rather as a turn-key solution, a tightly integrated, complete search solution. So in a few words, I think all the features are must-haves. We have yet to find any key feature missing, which is not something you can say about many solutions.
What has fast, relevant, easy to maintain search meant for www.engenio.com?
Since we implemented Ultraseek about four months ago, we have seen a significant, incremental improvement in the reduction of users that exit our site immediately after doing a search query. This was a problem prior to implementing Ultraseek. We firmly believe that Ultraseek is the reason behind this improvement because users are finding what they are looking for during their search queries.
Previously, users were so frustrated with the inadequate search results they were getting from our low-end search solution that they just bailed from our website. Now, they are finding what they are looking for.
Additionally, we have noticed an increase in the pages viewed per visitor since we implemented Ultraseek. Again, we attribute this to Ultraseek providing better search results and users sticking around longer on our website because they find what they are looking for.
Posted October 21, 2005 by editor
Category:
User Stories
Craft Powerful Regular Expressions
By Yusuf Mohsinally
Sr. Quality Assurance Engineer
Wildcards can be used to define filters that allow or disallow URLs in Ultraseek. They can also be used for various other purposes in the admin interface, such as to block some IP addresses or to increase the quality score of certain documents. In most cases, wildcards are sufficient. However, sometimes, you need a more powerful syntax to express your rules. Regular expressions are a syntax that can be used as an alternative to wildcards.
A First Attempt
Suppose you want to allow all URLs from your domain, mycorp.com. You might first attempt to define a wildcard allow filter for
http://*.mycorp.com/*
That would just about do it. It allows all the URLs from the domain, but it could also allow some that are not on the domain. For example, if someone linked to an archive of your site on "The Wayback Machine", at
http://web.archive.org/web/19990116234941/http://www.mycorp.com/
that URL would be allowed. The star from the wildcard expression could match all of
web.archive.org/web/19990116234941/http://www
Use Regular Expressions
First, change the type of syntax by selecting the drop-down box that shows "wildard" and changing it to "regex". Then enter a expression into the text box using the syntax for regular expressions. Ultraseek is built on the Python language and uses Python to process regular expressions, so you must use Python's syntax for regular expressions. Python's regular expression syntax is similar to the Perl language.
Next Attempt
Try replacing the star in the wildcard expression with a more restrictive pattern:
http://[^/]*.mycorp.com/*
The contents of the square brackets define a set of characters. The caret indicates that any character except what follows can match. This pattern will allow a URL only if the sequence of characters between http:// and .mycorp.com does not contain a slash. The string that matched the star in the previous example contains a slash and therefore would not match the new pattern.
Oops
If you revisited your collection, you would find that only the root URLs of sites are allowed. The cause of the problem is the star at the end of the pattern. In wildcard syntax, this star means a sequence of almost any characters. In regular expression syntax, it means repeating matches to the previous pattern element, which is in this case a slash. The pattern would allow all of the following URLs:
http://www.mycorp.com
http://www.mycorp.com/
http://www.mycorp.com//
http://www.mycorp.com///
Instead of a star by itself, you need
.*
The dot is a pattern matching almost any single character. Using the star to look for repetitions of the pattern matches a sequence of almost any characters.
Almost
http://[^/]*.mycorp.com/.*
The above regular expression will probably do a pretty good job, but it's not quite right. Remember, the dot in regular expression syntax means almost any character, and Python is interpreting the dots in the hostname to mean that as well. To make sure these only match a dot literally, escape them with backslashes:
http://[^/]*\.mycorp\.com/.*
Done
This regular expression will allow all URLs from the mycorp.com domain and only URLs from the mycorp.com domain.
When writing regular expressions for matching URLs, follow these tips to avoid common pitfalls:
1. Use .* where you would use * in a wildcard expression.
2. Escape characters with special meaning in regular expression syntax by using \. The special characters you're most likely to encounter in a URL are ., ?, and +. A full list of special characters is given in the Python documentation for regular expression syntax.
Posted October 12, 2005 by editor
Category:
Indexing
'More than Just a Search Tool'
Ken Moody, Web Specialist at Columbia Credit Union, discusses his organization's selection and deployment of Verity Ultraseek on its intranet and public website at www.columbiacu.org.
What business challenges prompted you to evaluate Verity Ultraseek?
On our public website at www.columbiaacu.org, we were using the native IIS indexing tool for search. On our intranet, we had no viable search solution at all. For both, Columbia Credit Union needed a solution that could efficiently index a wide variety of documents, in particular, .pdf and MS Office documents. Ultraseek does a terrific job of indexing these and other file formats.
Tell us about your Ultraseek implementation experience. How fast did you roll it out?
We were able to implement Ultraseek in just a few hours. Configuration was a breeze. Never has an installation gone as smoothly as Ultraseek! We are a fairly small shop, so ongoing administration must be minimal. Ultraseek continues to run flawlessly, and requires virtually no administrative maintenance.
How is Ultraseek used at Columbia Credit Union?
Currently, Ultraseek is used for enterprise search on our intranet. More than 225 employees use it to find information stored throughout our 3,000-document intranet. On our public website, Ultraseek has not only improved the ability of our members to quickly locate product and service information, but it has become a key in creating Web visibiility for promotions.
What Ultraseek feature could you not do without? Why?
The ability to create custom search results with the Quick Links feature is an invaluable tool. When Quick Links is combined with Ultraseek's excellent reporting capabilities, we can tailor specific responses to help maximize the effectiveness of the search tool. These customized responses are now a key component of our overall marketing strategy.
What has fast, relevant, easy to maintain search meant to Columbia Credit Union?
On our intranet, employees spend far less time searching because they are able to locate the forms and information they need without hunting through numerous pages. On our public website, Ultraseek helps us offer an improved user experience for our members. We can also better drive our marketing strategies by delivering promotional Quick Links based on related search topics. Ultraseek is more than just a search tool; it is a valuable vehicle for expanding product awareness and driving promotional strategies.
Posted October 04, 2005 by editor
Category:
User Stories
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