Vivísimo Velocity brings structure to enterprise search

Velocity ships with extensive knowledge bases of synonyms, acronyms, abbreviations, and associations (in English and other languages) that improve clustering of similar ideas. Using the administration tool, I then added words and phrases specific to my organization. (Specialized optional modules are available for general science, government, news, and biomedicine.)

Free IT resource Hear how top CIOs turn change into a competitive advantage. Sponsored by HP Free IT resource Attend the SOA Executive Forum: Breaking SOA Bottlenecks SOAExecForum.com/may2007 Sponsored by InfoWorld Vivisimo Velocity 4.2 Vivísimo, vivisimo.com Excellent  8.7 criteria score weight Ease-of-use 8 20% Integration 9 20% Management 9 20% Performance 9 20% Scalability 8 10% Value 9 10% Cost: Starts at $10,000 per year Platforms: Clustering and metasearch run on Windows, Linux, and Solaris; search engine module is available exclusively for Linux Bottom Line: Combining dynamic clustering, search, and metasearch, Velocity can be deployed faster and less expensively than other search solutions. Velocity simultaneously searches multiple information sources and presents the results in organized folders from a single consistent interface. Additionally, the software will combine several URLs into a single result. Custom parsing makes results more meaningful. About our Reviews and Scoring Methodology

Yet another interesting function allows you to attach external metadata to documents; most other solutions require this information to be embedded in each document, which takes a lot of manual effort. In my testing I employed a separate spreadsheet containing additional information about marketing material that existed in PDF format. Using the parser, I associated a row in the spreadsheet with metadata related to each Acrobat document, thus giving more precise results.

To wrap up, I created a metasearch source that collected my Verity search of an external Web site, the Vivísimo intranet search, and an external XML news feed. The federated results were correctly shown together in one search and clustered into pertinent categories. Administrators could do the same bundling of other external sources -- such as premium news and research services -- and popular databases. (MySQL, PostgreSQL, IBM DB2, Oracle, and Sybase are also supported.)

Vivísimo Velocity reflects its origins of being designed by computer scientists: It’s a thorough, high-performing search platform, but it requires some schooling for maximum tuning. That said, the basics can be deployed within a day at much lower cost compared with typical enterprise-search undertakings. And within a few days you can likely have the system interpreting large amounts of information from many internal and external sources, presenting the results in organized folders. That’s a time line and economy other solutions -- which typically involve long-term taxonomy projects requiring costly professional services -- will have a hard time matching. For all these reasons, Vivísimo Velocity 4.2 should be on your short list as a primary information-retrieval platform.

-- Mike Heck