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| CSIRO | SOLVE | Issue 4 Aug 05 | |
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ARTICLE
SEARCH TECHNOLOGY: New Aussie Seeker
By Diny Slamet
THE PANOPTICTM ENTERPRISE SEARCH ENGINE BOASTS MORE POWER AND BETTER FEATURES THAN ITS RIVALS, AND IT WAS DEVELOPED BY CSIRO. Internet and intranet search engines have become one of the modern office’s most indispensable tools, and are one area of technology in which smart young ‘dot-com’ entrepreneurs have found fortunes. Even computer novices tend to know a little about search engines, particularly if they mainly log on to browse or shop online. Yet it might come as a surprise to learn that one of the most powerful search engines, Panoptic™, was developed by CSIRO. Used by some of Australia’s biggest organisations, Panoptic is an enterprise search engine, which means it is the search engine an organisation uses to allow its customers and staff to search the organisation’s own external and internal websites. Panoptic has enjoyed a surge in customer numbers in the past year, as it has been improved and word has spread. Panoptic customers include the Australian, Queensland, Victorian and ACT Governments, the Australian Stock Exchange, Westpac, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, ninemsn, the Australian National University, Queensland University of Technology and, of course, CSIRO itself.
Dr David Hawking, a senior researcher at the CSIRO ICT (Information and Communications Technology) Centre, says Panoptic’s advanced relevance-ranking system provides more useful results than other search engines. Panoptic also has additional capabilities that many other search engines do not have, such as an image search, a more sophisticated query language, the ability to suggest alternatives when typographical errors are made, the ability to integrate with other enterprise software and the ability to index a range of document formats including web pages, data, email messages and Word documents from a shared file system. Another feature that may soon be added is support for Continuous Media Web, in which videos and audio clips can link to each other and to ordinary web pages in the same way static web pages can be linked. “There are many search products on the market that have a much simpler ranking method that just don’t produce results that meet a searcher’s needs,” says Dr Hawking. “Before Westpac switched to Panoptic, for example, if you typed in the phrase ‘home loans’, you’d get results for 10 archived media releases that weren’t at all relevant to someone wanting to borrow money for a house. Now, you get the key entry page on the site to that topic as the top rank result.” The Australian Stock Exchange has had a four-fold increase in visits to its site since it switched to Panoptic. The site is used by investors, listed companies, stockbrokers, government departments and anyone seeking regulatory information. ASX spokesman Tom Moschitz says users had not bothered much with the previous engine, frustrated by its supply of irrelevant results. It is a similar story at Queensland University of Technology, where the previous engine had been quite complex and less reliable. The University switched in March 2005. Its search specialist, Simon Morecroft, says Panoptic was easily configured to the University’s needs and has not required a single restart. This has allowed the University’s web managers to dedicate more time to sophisticated tuning and maintenance. A recent report by the IT advisory firm IDC Corporation says the cost to an enterprise in lost effort, time spent recreating information that already exists and decision-making based on faulty or incomplete information is significant. Similarly, research by the US Neilsen Norman Group shows ineffectual corporate search tools can be the biggest drag on employee productivity, costing companies as much as $US15 million annually. Dr Hawking says Panoptic can search an intranet, as well as the contents of documents on shared file systems, databases, phone directories and email messages, but that there are obstacles to achieving the goal of a unified search over all of an organisation’s information resources. “Security and privacy are major factors,” he says. “Ensuring that a person only sees what they have permission to see can seriously slow down a search because of the need to test every single candidate result.” Dr Hawking says that CSIRO has done well in getting the system into so many large Australian organisations, largely through word-of-mouth referrals. But the time is now ripe, he says, to turn its sights to the US and European markets. He says CSIRO is working on plans to spin Panoptic off as a separate business. APPLICATION CSIRO ICT researchers have applied an advanced relevance-ranking system to produce search technology Panoptic. BENEFIT Now used by some of Australia’s largest organisations, Panoptic may be marketed in Europe and the US. For further information contact: |
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Recent IDC and Nielsen return-on-investment studies show that poor search mechanisms cost organisations millions of dollars a year. This was recently amplified when the ABC reported that its online sales had increased by 24 per cent after it switched to Panoptic.
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