IBM Benefits from Enterprise Tagging Service

Enterprise Tagging Service social software saves IBM $4.6 million a year by Mixed by Gregory Culpin (Knowledge Officer @ Whatever) in Enterprise 2.0

Interesting posting at a blog for Enterprise Social Search - IBM set up an Enterprise Tagging Search service and have reported excellent results

"What they found was amazing when you look at it in context: the average person saved 12 seconds, across the 286000+ searches performed through ETS each week. This sums up to 955 hours saved each week across the company. In terms of cost savings, it amounts to a rough estimate of $4.6 million a year, in terms of productivity gain."

Basics of Faceted Search

The Future of Search? Faceted Search by Daniel Tunkelang, Chief Scientist at Endeca, Altsearchengines (Oct )

Endeca is known for the faceted search it offers. In this article, its chief scientist, Daniel Tunkeland, provides a brief description, some images, and some history.

Mainly -- "As a practical matter, the facets for a collection are typically derived either from pre-existing fields in a database (e.g., the columns in a relational database or data warehouse) or by applying information extraction techniques to unstructured content, (e.g., detecting names of people and places in free text)."

Faceted approach is most often seen at retail web sites since it is an excellent way to allow browse and search of products by brand, prices, and various attributes.

Federated Search

There is an excellent primer on Federated Search by Jill Hurst-Wahl in FUMSI (Oct 22, 2008). This is an excerpt from her report, the Federated Search Report and Toolkit. The excerpt provides a clear description of what federated search is ( -- single interface that has the ability to simultaneously search multiple data sources) and the questions that should be asked when considering whether your company would benefit from adopting this kind of software. Among the features to look for is -- Faceted or topically clusteredsearch results.

Taxonomy Starter

Creating User Centred Taxonomies: Part One by James Kelway, FUMSI (Aug 2008)

"This two-part article is a step-by-step guide for those wishing to create new taxonomies for their business unit, or client. It will outline the many different elements that make up a quality taxonomy and the pitfalls you should be aware of when starting a new project."

Creating User-Centred Taxonomies: Part Two (Sept 2008)

"In part two of this article, we look at creating, testing and launching the taxonomy."

Both are excellent summaries and are well illustrated.