We recently partnered with ArnoldIT on a demonstration site that enables visitors to search 10 years of Google Patents using the ISYS:web search solution for enterprise search, intranet search and site search.  ArnoldIT officially announced the new site today.  For the Google Patent Search demonstration site, we unlocked a handful of advanced search, discovery and mining capabilities (what Steve Arnold refers to as “beyond search” functions).  These include: parametric search; context clouds; intelligent query expansion; auto-classification; ISYS Entities; and metadata refinement.

We invite you to visit the Google Patent Search demonstration site and give it a try for yourself.  You can also try it in your own environment by visiting our website and requesting an evaluation of the ISYS:web search solution.

The folks over at CMSWatch released its “cross-check” of the 2009 Search Report.  We encourage you to check it out, as it’s one of the more in-depth information access report available.

With all due respect to the great search team at CMSWatch, we do have to highlight that the lag between vendor interviews and when the report is published is somewhat disappointing.  We certainly understand the massive challenge they face in keeping on top of this fast-moving, crowded market, but we all can appreciate just how much changes in this space over the course of nine months.

The pace of innovation and growth at ISYS is the highest it has been in our 20-year history.  As you follow this blog over the course of 2009, we’re confident you’ll see exactly what we’re talking about.  We very much look forward to briefing the CMSWatch team on what we’ve been up to since June 2008.  In the meantime, we invite you to review the report and then call ISYS to learn about the latest and greatest.

An addled goose who goes by the name of Steve Arnold recently interviewed our new CEO, Scott Coles, as part of ArnoldIT’s Search Wizards Speak series of interviews with enterprise search executives.  The interview covers a lot of ground, including  ISYS’s plans for search in 2009 and beyond.

What’s clear is ISYS is taking everything customers and partners have come to know and love about us over the last 20 years and going even deeper to address the real challenges in search and help customers further leverage their search investments.  Some of the ways we’re doing this is through complimentary executive briefings and application audits.

When industry consultants like Steve Arnold say that search is broken, it’s largely the result of poor education and a disconnect between the vendor and customer.  Our executive briefings and application audits are designed to get us aligned with your requirements immediately from the onset, thus ensuring successful implementation and end-user adoption.

We invite you to contact us to request a complimentary session with our leadership team.  We’ve always taken great pride in the personal service we deliver to our customer base, so we’re pleased to further extend this benefit.

In the last two weeks, ISYS has had the privilege of landing on a handful analysts’ radars.  On Sept. 30, 2008, Gartner Inc. announced its 2008 Magic Quadrant for Information Access Technology, where ISYS is listed among many of the key players in the market.

Gilbane Group’s Lynda Moulton mentioned ISYS in a recent blog post, where she espoused the virtues of the nimble search players.  ISYS has long advocated an “iterative” approach to search, so we’re pleased to see the analyst community put some substance behind a philosophy we strongly encourage.

And finally, the venerable Steve Arnold was gracious enough to relay how he uses ISYS as one of his key tools for Google patent analysis.  Many folks know the fine work Steve has done tracking the GOOG, and it’s an honor to know ISYS plays a small role in his sought-after research.

If you’re a regular reader of Lynda Moulton’s Enterprise Search blog for the Gilbane Group, you’re no doubt familiar with the recent research work she’s done on the industry and its players.  I’m sure Lynda has ample physical evidence to support how much work she and her team put into this (copious research notes, gallons of coffee and many sleepless nights, we’re sure), but the end product is quite comprehensive and informative.

In the report, you’ll find “practical guidance about product evaluation, selection, implementation, deployment and maintenance.”  A terrific “Getting Started” guide for anyone currently evaluating search, information access and discovery technologies.

Get your copy here, and then contact us with your questions.

Those who follow ISYS in the UK know that Solcara has been a longtime, valued partner of ours.  Solcara designs federated search technology designed to help organizations better control, manage and locate their digital information.  Recently, Solcara announced its new SolSearch solution, which pairs our indexing technology with Solcara’s federated search capabilities.

Solcara has had considerable success serving the information access and management needs of the legal industry, among other markets.  It helps professionals connect to their know how systems, as well as search and locate vital information that resides across a variety of sources, both internally and externally.  We’re pleased to play a role in these solutions and look forward to continued work with Solcara.

Take a moment to learn more about SolSearch and see what it can do for your organization.  You can also access third-party reporting and analysis from IT Week and over at the Beyond Search blog.

Part Two in our series of enterprise search white papers focuses on the notion of search as an iterative process.  If you’ve seen ISYS speak in recent months, you’ll know this has been our key topic in 2008. 

What we’re attempting to convey through this paper and our talks is that even when you approach enterprise search from a strategic level (i.e., we want to empower ALL employees with the ability to find their important content), your implementation has to start somewhere (i.e., the legal department is legally bound to respond immediately to a discovery request).

So what we encourage customers to ask themselves is, “Will the $300k one-size-fits-all platform I buy today give my engineering group the answer they needed yesterday?”  By instead taking an iterative approach to search, you address your immediate pain points through rapid rollout and gain valuable lessons about what’s good, what’s bad and what needs improvement, all of which feed into the next “iteration” of your deployment.

It’s true that one of enterprise search’s aims is to eliminate “siloed” information, but unless you deliver effective search to each individual business unit, your adoption rates will remain low and the industry will continue to hear reports from analysts stating that search is broken.  Read on to learn more about the iterative philosophy.

Within the last week, two statements from industry analysts and consultants caught our attention:

“Enterprise search still sucks”

and

“Enterprise search is a myth … it doesn’t exist”

The former statement is attributed to Dan Keldsen’s BizTechTalk post of last week, in which he touches on some of the early findings from his (AIIM’s) Market IQ study on Findability.  The telling metric in Dan’s post states that 69 percent of respondents say that less than half of their enterprise information is searchable.  Obviously, you can’t find it if the document you care about is not even in your search engine’s index.

Coincidentally, AIIM’s findings feed nicely into the latter statement above, which came from Steve Arnold during his keynote session with Lynda Moulton at the Gilbane Conference in San Francisco last week.  His contention is “enterprise search” is a stupid phrase that has no meaning, since you’d be hard-pressed to find a single organization that lets every user search every shred of enterprise content.  What Steve would tell you is if you came across such an animal, said organization would be sitting on a serious security breach situation.

Having been in the game since 1988, ISYS has watched the terminology used to describe our industry bounce around like pinball, and to be quite honest, we’re happy with enterprise search as our marquee descriptor.  It’s simple to say, easy to market and makes a fairly illustrative distinction between itself and its broader “world wide web search” cousin.

But Steve is right — search really is much more tactical than the big platform and infrastructure vendors would have you believe.  Pain points are always going to be higher within one group or business unit, and hence these groups are much more ready to adopt search techology and prove its value.  In the coming days, we will post Part Two in our series of White Papers, in which we discuss search as an iterative process, so stay tuned. 

This Thursday (June 19 at 11 a.m. Pacific), ISYS will be participating in a panel discussion at the Gilbane Conference in San Francisco.  The panel is part of Gilbane’s Enterprise Search and Text Analytics track, with the topic focused on what’s new and hot in search.  The panel will be moderated by Gilbane’s lead analyst for search, Lynda Moulton, who is constantly battling Steve Arnold for the title of “Most Prolific Enterprise Search Blogger” (although Steve, and possibly even Lynda, might object to the phrase “enterprise search”).  Both Lynda’s blog and Steve’s blog provide perhaps the best and most thorough collection of news and analysis of what’s happening in search, so be sure to check them out.

A brief description of the session can be found on the Gilbane San Francisco website.  For ISYS’ part, we’ll be discussing some of the new capabilities you’ll find in our new upcoming release.  This will be your chance to get the inside scoop on the technology before it’s released, so be sure to attend and say hello after the session.

As ISYS Search Software approaches its 20th birthday, its dutiful staff felt it was time to expand our communications into the ever-expanding world of corporate blogging.  And while individuals with greater knowledge on the subject could debate for days the merits of blogging, for ISYS it’s a logical extension of the types of customer and industry communications we’ve been doing for many years.

Longtime readers of our ISYS Update newsletter have been following along at home for quite some time now.  We evolved from a print edition to HTML email and now onto the weblog format.  Never fear loyal readers — our ever-popular riddle will make regular appearances in the blog, so we’ll continue to feed your brain-tease fix.

The focus of ISYS Enterprise Search Insights is to highlight the enterprise search industry’s hot topics and issues, tying them back to how ISYS and its customers see the world.  Various members of our staff will chime in from time to time, ensuring we capture and communicate multiple perspectives on the subject of search software.   We’ll also be tapping guest speakers, from customers and partners to industry insiders and observers.  You can rest assured we’re not looking to use this as a political vehicle; we’ll rely on the same plain-talk honesty we’ve become known for, with the overarching goal of highlighting key topics and stirring new ways of thinking about enterprise search.

To kick things off, we’ll be doing a multi-part series on various search topics with which we’re quite familiar.  Whenever possible, we’ll point to complementary content to help expand on the topic.  For this first series, we’ll be looking at our collection of enterprise search white papers, with topics ranging from e-discovery compliance to search analytics.  Please don’t hesitate to comment as we go along … the more comments, the better the discussion.