...need. Within most enterprises, information continuously retrieved and then shuffled between software applications. Search and its allied access tools, then, are no longer a luxury for most organizations. Given the need, however, how are we to make sense of a crowded search market?

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Unfortunately, no two search engines or information access platforms are exactly alike. Even among plain, unvarnished search engines, the retrieval technologies and ranking algorithms differ, some favoring one kind of search or collection, some another. Broad, shallow collections may need different tools from narrow, deep ones. Large or heavily used collections will have different demands for scalability, performance, categorization or interaction than those that are small or lightly used. It is advisable to start looking for a search engine or platform first by analyzing what you want it to do and whom you want it to serve.

Begin by considering the types of information seeking tasks that the information access platform should support. Some of the information access tasks to consider include:

* browse,

* navigate,

* search and retrieve,

* monitor,

* discover and analyze,

* distribute, and

* feedback.

Each of those tasks requires a slightly different type of software. For instance, browsing requires categorization and/or clustering so that users can explore a topic or collection without having to frame a query. Visualization is particularly helpful for browsing because images convey more information and convey it more quickly than text might. Visualization is also useful for interacting with the results of a search, or for exploring and analyzing large collections of data that are located in a business intelligence or text analytics discovery session.

Different tasks, different needs

Retrieval requires an explicit query, and is the most familiar content access technology--a standard search engine. Specialized forms of retrieval, such as question answering/online technical support, require language analysis and text mining, in addition to search. Categorization is an important element in sharpening retrieval, and it has been incorporated into most of...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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