Universal Search – Interwoven Universal Search
I saw an in-person demo today by RBRO Solutions on the new Interwoven Universal Search. Nice product.
Pros:
– it can crawl and search pretty much any type of data or document management system (i.e., it is not limited to Interwoven for DMS searching)
– the “universal” element means you can choose to search, for example, on “motion to compel” on your internal document management system, on Lexis or Westlaw, the World Wide Web and your internal library catalog, all in one search (the product comes “out of the box” with a fairly large number of “connectors” to allow this searching; to search some databases, such as Lexis or Westlaw, you need to purchase or build a specialized connector).
– it is a single search box (like Google)
– it uses Vivisimo search technology to “cluster” search results (like Clusty, for example). See also USA.gov as an example of a site that uses Vivisimo
– admin staff can “edit” the cluster names so that they are more applicable to how the organization names categories
– it will likely be able to accommodate Web 2.0 features, such as allowing users to tag and comment on documents – see the post by Doug Cornelius at KM Space on Vivisimo’s Velocity 6.0 tool
For customers who have Interwoven as their DMS and who upgrade to version 8.3, there will be a more basic (but free) version of this Vivisimo-drive search functionality to search only within Interwoven through your Outlook search/view (which will be much, much better than the existing arcane search built into Interwoven). Otherwise, the “Interwoven Universal Search” web product described above is sold/licensed as a “stand alone” product.
For other comments on Interwoven Universal Search, see the results of a Google Blog search on that topic.
Ted –
You start off with the Pros. Did you come up with any Cons? (Other than price)
I was going to mention “price” as a “con.” It would seem to fall within the pricing of the other, high-end enterprise search products. I suspect they risk a slight delay in “uptake” in that those organizations with Interwoven may first opt for the “free” Worksite version that comes with the 8.3 upgrade to see what it is like (realizing of course the free version is not universal or federated searching).
It is likely reasonable to assume (and hope)that pricing overall in the enterprise/universal search industry may be more competitive in the future as more companies go to market with their products.
Another possible issue in a law firm setting is the usability of the cluster categories created “on the fly.” Our demo was searching only a very, very small set of documents so it was hard to judge the usefulness of the cluster categories (although, as was explained, you can manually tweak these categories).
SearchBlox has released a search results clustering engine. They have a Free Edition which indexes and clusters up to a 1000 documents. Their 1 million documents enterprise clustered search engine is priced at $7,499 which is much lower than Vivisimo. These tools are awesome for research purposes. This application can perform federated search across websites, documents and RSS/Atom feeds.