No 3, April 2009
Welcome to the third edition of our bi-annual newsletter. After close to a decade in the enterprise search space I am delighted to be part of the exciting and talented Funnelback team. This was acknowledged by our inclusion in the MIS Strategic 100 with our "Rising Star" status in December last year.
We extend a special welcome and thanks to our growing list of customers both new and repeat. A special mention to our new friends at Bank of Queensland and PacificNetwork.tv. Welcome aboard! Look out for a number of new announcements in the near future.
Once again we have moved offices. We were very privileged to have Jon Stanhope, Chief Minister of the ACT, officially open them on March 17th.
The new contact details are as follows:
Postal: PO BOX 1441, Dickson, ACT, 2602
Office: Unit 9, 20 Challis St., Dickson, ACT, 2602
We also have new phone and fax numbers:
Ph: +61 2 6175 8500
Fax: +61 2 6162 1755
We hope you enjoy the new newsletter. I look forward to meeting you all at some point along the way!
Very best regards,
Julian Cruickshank
Senior Sales Consultant
Search for Segmented Audiences
Author: Dr. David Hawking, Funnelback's Chief Scientist
Funnelback Profiles
Taking up a point from the September 08 newsletter, many organisations offer a search facility which is used by a number of distinct groups of users - a segmented audience. For example, an enterprise search facility in a company may be used by managers, accountants, sales people and technical staff. Some queries (such as "September report" or the name of an important customer) may be submitted by members of any of these groups, but each may expect a different set of answers. How can the search operator keep everyone happy?
Funnelback profiles can support completely different search behaviours from a single index. For example, a 'technical' profile for the above company might:
Include a bias toward the document formats used by the engineers, or toward documents in certain parts of the collection,
Exclude parts of the document collection which are of no interest to this group,
Switch to a ranking function which favours matches in the problem-description field of documents (if present)
Use a set of appropriately targeted featured pages,Use a thesaurus tailored to this group. For example CFD could be interpreted as Computational Fluid Dynamics, rather than as Current Financial Data or Collateral for Demonstrations.
Profiles are available in Funnelback ASP offerings and are used to customise the Australian Government search service (australia.gov.au) to the needs of individual agencies. If you are interested, please contact support@funnelback.com.
(As yet, Funnelback does not have a mechanism for automatically assigning people to profiles, and is wary of developing one. Borrowing someone's computer and discovering the profile they had been assigned to could be embarassing and could be a violation of privacy. )
Funnelback Plug-ins
Another approach to supporting distinct user populations is exemplified by the search facility at the National Prescribing Service (NPS).
NPS is funded by the Australian Government Department of Health & Ageing and has a mission to "provide accurate, balanced, evidence-based information and services to help people choose if, when and how to use medicines to improve their health and wellbeing."
NPS have identified five distinct groups among the many visitors to their site: Consumers, Health Professionals, Members and Stakeholders, Researchers and Evaluators and Other. They want to highlight results which are of most interest to those groups.
When you type a query into the search box at NPS, your query is actually run 5 times with different parameters, using the Funnelback plug-in mechanism. A couple of results are presented for each segment plus a link for more results for this segment.
If you don't suffer from any conditions or diseases yourself and aren't taking any medications, you could try 'headache' or 'ibuprofen'.
Funnelback plug-ins allow multiple searches to be combined into a single results page. Searches can be run over different collections (local or remote) or over the same collection with different options or scopes.
Plug-ins are available in Funnelback ASP offerings and will be supported in Funnelback version 9.0. If you're interested, please contact support@funnelback.com.
Solving the search problem for Pacific Network TV
Author: Jim Tink, Funnelback & Edgy Lee, Pacific Network TV
Pacific Network (pacificnetwork.tv/) is an interactive portal made up of a number of different sites for Hawaiin themed videos and articles. The sites contain over 1000 videos from news, history and sports video channels, numerous articles, an online store and a social networking site.
The problem
When Pacific Network launched their website the search functionality was problematic and suffered the following problems:
There was no mechanism to search over all sites.
Pacificnetwork.tv search did not generate proper titles or summaries.
The ranking was poor and often incorrect results were returned.
There was no way to search the video content displayed on Pacificnetwork.tv
With over 8,300 searchable items on the Pacific Network website, the solution had to be easy to install and administer, provide high quality and accurate results and be managed externally.
Poor search was adversely impacting upon the website user experience and utility of Pacific Network's online content.
The Solution
Funnelback was able to provide Pacific Network with a hosted Software as a Service (SaaS) search solution which addressed all of the problems faced by Pacific Network. In particular Funnelback was able to use Pacific Network's existing workflows and procedures to search video content. Search now enhances the effectiveness of the video library and the impact of social networking.
Some of the specific pieces of customization provided by Funnelback included:
Video Content
Pacific Network's online video library manages video content by allowing the user to upload a video, and add a title and description. This information is not published on the Pacific Network web site or on the Video Provider website and can not therefore be included in the search by normal methods. However, using some simple customization Funnelback was able to download the video manifest using Pacific Network's existing API in order to create an XML interface which Funnelback uses to search over the information about each video.
Seamless Integration
Pacific Network has a number of procedures when managing videos. Videos classified either as advertisements, not ready for publication or that need to be removed are identified in the title. Funnelback excludes these videos from the search service by using and matching these identifiers. In this way, Funnelback has been able to integrate with Pacific Network's existing business model.
Query expansion
Abbreviation for some topics was identified as an issue for Pacific Network. Some items mentioned the abbreviation whilst others would mention the phrase. Specific search queries therefore would not return accurate results. Funnelback uses its ability to expand a search query to include the abbreviation and its phrase.
Amalgamating search results
Funnelback can search over a number of different repositories including databases, file shares and websites. The search service provided to Pacific Network searches over their social network site, the online store and video content. When amalgamating the search results from the different websites Funnelback provides the ability to apply rank weightings to websites, or part of a website. Pacific Network has their video content, articles and store up- weighted to steer users towards this content.
Easy to use interface
Funnelback provides a simple and easy to use template administration form. The Pacific Network template was easily applied to the search service. The template allows customisations to be made to results. Video content versus web content on the Pacific Network site is easily distinguished by using the metadata associated with the videos to display a thumbnail image next to the result.
Pacific Network and Richard Earl Leong Yu Hadad-Ralya from SKEEO creative are currently in the process of revamping the Pacific Network site and will continue to focus on improving accessibility of information with fast and accurate search functionality provided by Funnelback at it's core.
The Verdict
Edgy Lee, Founder & CEO of PacificNetwork.tv says "We created PacificNetwork.tv as a platform that bridges the Pacific region with the world. When we began working with Funnelback we found efficiency, high quality work, and the kind of attention we often find lacking from companies that live around the corner. Our experience has been a virtual pleasure. Add to this the ease in working with quick response from people thousands of miles from where we physically reside, without any noticeable delays in time differential, I cannot say enough about how great Funnelback is both in functionality and service. "
Would you like to see the latest Funnelback features before they are released? Funnelback's R&D team are looking for users who are interested in participating in our beta testing program.
Take the survey
If you're currently using the Funnelback product and would like to complete our survey please click here and a consultant will be in touch with the details.
Products and Services: Meet the team
Author: Products and Services Team, Funnelback
P&S is a small busy team responsible for consulting projects, hosted services, technical support, product quality assurance and pre-sales. Read on to find out more about the people in the team.
Kat Ng, Team Leader. Kat joined Funnelback in December 2006, and currently leads the P&S team. She has also worked on the Whole of Queensland Government project and other search consultancies for AGIMO, AIC, CareerOne, the Department of Infrastructure and Telstra. Previously, she worked in operational support, incident management and systems administration.
Jim Tink, Technical Consultant. Jim moved to Canberra mid 2008 after finishing his Computer Science degree at the University of New South Wales. He has worked on projects for the State Library of Tasmania, Pacific Network TV and the Group of Eight. Jim previously worked in Unix technical roles for the RTA and iMMedian.
Ben Pottier, Technical Consultant. Ben started at Funnelback in June 2007. He has worked on several major consultancies which include the National Prescribing Service (advanced taxonomy and parallel searching), Geoscience Australia (TRIM) and AGOSP. He has also worked on other search consultancies for AGIMO, AIC, CareerOne, ASX and many others. Originally from Belgium, Ben previously worked as a software developer for a large logistics company in Europe.
Daniel Nitsche, Technical Consultant. Funnelback is pleased to welcome Dan into the P&S team. Dan brings with him over ten years web development and design experience. Dan is originally from Melbourne, and previously worked for a prominent Australian Content Management System vendor. There he worked with many clients on many large projects including several projects for state and federal government. Stay tuned to hear more from Dan!
Puthick Hok, SaaS Consultant. Puthick first heard about Funnelback during a milestone presentation by Dr. David Hawking whilst studying at the Australian National University. This inspired him into pursuing the search engine field. Puthick joined Funnelback in August 2008. He is now the GNU/Linux system administrator for Funnelback's hosted servers. Currently, he is working on several interesting projects in enhancing the SaaS service.
Alwyn Davis, Technical Consultant. Alwyn has unfortunately, only recently left Funnelback to tour around Europe for a year. We all wish him safe and enjoyable travels.
Clients can contact P&S using support@funnelback.com for any enquiries or Funnelback assistance. We are always happy to help!
Click data. Funnelback can "learn" from user queries to up-weight popular results. For instance, if search users are looking for "motor homes" and tend to click on the "registration form" result more often than other higher ranking results, Funnelback will gradually improve the relevance of that result. To enable this feature, simply turn the 'Click tracking' option to 'Enabled' and the 'Click data ranking' option to 'On'. This page is located in 'Edit Collection Settings' in the 'Administer' tab of the administration console.
Click tracking:
Click data ranking:
More information on click data is available from http://docs.funnelback.com/8.0/using_click_data_to_improve_rankings.html
Searching 'date' metadata. 'Date' metadata is automatically indexed under the 'd' metadata class by default. To filter searches by date, use the URL parameters 'meta_d', 'meta_d1' or 'meta_d2'.
'meta_d' is an exact match to the date.
'meta_d1' matches all dates greater than the supplied date (after).
'meta_d2' matches all dates less than the supplied date (before).
For example:
'meta_dday=1&meta_dmonth=Mar&meta_dyear=2009'
searches for documents published on 1 March 2009
'meta_d1month=Mar&meta_d1year=2009'
searches for documents published after Mar 2009
'meta_d2year=2009'
searches for documents published before 2009.
More information on searching date or other metadata fields is available from http://docs.funnelback.com/8.0/metadata_search_field.html.
If you have any Funnelback tips or tricks you'd like to share, please email us with your suggestions: media@funnelback.com
We hope you've enjoyed our 3rd newsletter.
If you'd like to suggest how we can improve the Funnelback product or,
you're interested in a search tuning and upgrade,
please call Ph: 02 6175 8500 or email: media@funnelback.com. We're always happy to hear from you.
Sincerely, The Funnelback Team
