Stable, scalable search

Vivisimo has introduced its Velocity 5.5 enterprise search platform, which, the company says, delivers high scalability and fault tolerance to enterprises with growing amounts of data and ever-changing regulatory demands. Vivisimo further emphasizes the new version's ease of use for both administrators and knowledge workers.

Velocity 5.5 enables network administrators to easily replicate instances of a single index across multiple services, allowing 99.99% up time, according to Vivisimo. For example, the company says, if one server crashes, the second or third server storing a copy of that index will fulfill the search request. Vivisimo adds that the new version also allows administrators to quickly segment an index onto multiple servers for maximum application performance in high-usage, data-intensive scenarios. Both replication and segmentation of indexes are accomplished through a simple point-and-click within the Velocity Web administrative interface, taking minutes to configure.

Velocity 5.5 also offers new search functionality to enhance the user experience. It now handles such advanced queries as word proximity, complex date range and natural language. In addition, Velocity 5.5 offers a tool for query expansion. For example, some names have many different spellings because they were transliterated into the Roman alphabet from other writing systems (Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, etc.). Velocity 5.5 offers the ability to suggest alternative queries for misspellings, word stemming, alternative translations and synonyms--all based upon administrator-defined content.