Independent Search Engine Developers

A technical and business discussion group for developers, consultants, IT people and managers who work with Enterprise Search Engines such as Verity/Autonomy, FAST, Endeca, the Google Appliance, DieselPoint, IBM OmniFind, Vivisimo, Exalead and Intellisearch. We also cover the open source players like Lucene / Solr / Nutch appear in specific enterprise applications. Even some content management systems, like Microsoft SharePoint, are being used for corporate search these days. And we welcome the older standard setters like K2, VDK, Ultraseek and Search 97.

Why a single group to cover so many different engines? While some engines already have specific groups (which we will link to), most large companies own more than one engine, so vendor selection and integration can be rather complex, and of course each vendor pushes their own solutions. What's the difference between "Parametric Search" from Vendor A and "Faceted Navigation" from Vendor B? Should I use Entity Extraction or Noun Phrases? How would I build a cross platform Taxonomy?

The technical requirements of corporate Intranet search are quite different than those of public portals and generic B2C search. The good news is that most vendors now offer quality spidering technology, support many document formats, and have rich Java APIs. Coders unite!

We hope this group will be a good starting point and technical meeting area.

Usage:
You are responsible for the contents of your postings; we suggest you do not divulge proprietary information. Discussions of specific vendors should be professional and factual.

Keywords:
Autonomy IDOL and Search97; FAST Search & Transfer FDS, ESP and InStream; Ultraseek (sold under Infoseek, Inktomi, Verity and Autonomy brands); Endeca; the "Google Search Appliance" / "Google Box" / GSA; Lucene/Nutch; IBM OmniFind; Oracle Text; Cold Fusion; and many others. Many of these vendors have been included on the Gartner Magic Quadrants