Search gets personal

Vivisimo announces the Velocity Search Platform 7.0, which has been designed, it says, to advance conceptual search with a new interface that gives users explicit control to fine-tune queries and personalize search to meet their information goals.

Velocity's conceptual search empowers users to identify their search goal upfront. Velocity 7.0 gives users the option to increase precision to search for particular documents or increase recall to find all related information, making more explicit the relationships between data. Further, the new interface allows users to see precisely how they are modifying their search, explains Vivisimo.

The company claims that by making the process of modifying searches more transparent and giving more control over that process to users, Velocity 7.0 helps produce better, more satisfying results. Other implementations that hide the search modification process behind an "engine-knows-best" facade produce less relevant results and more frustrated users.

In Velocity 7.0, users can expand queries using automatically created related concepts derived from a combination of Vivisimo's clustering methods and enhanced heuristics. Further, says the company, thesauri and ontologies can be incorporated to refine or expand queries using synonyms and broader or narrower terms.

Vivisimo highlights the following new developments in 7.0:

• Conceptual search empowers users to personalize intent of their task--to expand or refine their search--using the new interface.
• Velocity 7.0 leverages an enterprise's work to create thesauri and ontologies, providing employees with an easy way to use them in improving discovery of desired information.
• IT configuration is Web-based, allowing administrators to easily define default settings.