I spent some time on the telephone with the folks at Endymion who are excited about their ZNow search capabilities. And I have to admit, it’s pretty durn cool in the non-flashy-but-useful way. ZNow is a search engine that does the usual stuff (indexes HTML, Word, PDF) but also does quite a reasonable job of dynamically suggesting categories by which you can refine your search. (Note: My comments are based on a few minutes of kicking at a couple of demo sites.) For example, at a demo site that uses the content of the Open Directory project for its contents, if you search on “Jazz,” the right side lists the results but the left side lists about 20 categories by which you can further specify your search. The list is quite reasonable: arts, styles, dance, instruments, blues, band, performing args, classical, rock, guitar, etc.

Most interesting, the list is developed dynamically. Other engines suggest categories and folders but they require specifying the categories ahead of time. ZNow instead uses the word usage patterns of the pages in the results list to dynamically compute suggested categories.

It’s designed for intranets and extranets and is competitively priced against Verity, which means that you’re looking in the low hundreds of thousands for reasonable installations.

Categories: Uncategorized dw