Search Applications - Coveo - Advanced Website Search

In my last post, I described Coveo for advanced enterprise search. In this post, I will describe Coveo for advanced website search.

Coveo takes your existing Web Content Management to a new level of insight and productivity. Coveo creates a virtual integration layer between your WCM and all your company’s key information sources (knowledge bases, databases, cloud content) to provide powerful, consolidated insight.

Coveo recommends the most relevant content to visitors, powered by indexing and search across any set of diverse systems. You can increase customer satisfaction by finding the missing content your customers are looking for. Smart navigation and search makes relevant content quickly apparent for your users. Website visitors will be presented with relevant, related content without the administrator having to create the links and without the visitor having to search!

You can instantly correlate content from your WCM/CMS such as Sitecore with other key information sources, including your Salesforce, SharePoint, Exchange, Lithium, and more.

Features

WCM Features

Out-of-the-box usability - you can start getting insight immediately without any difficult set up or configuration.

Related Topics - automatically correlate site content to relevant content based on similar themes and attributes.

Composite Views - composite views that combine relevant site content with other corporate system outside WCM (Communities, Intranet, CRM, Social, etc.)

Modular, flexible design - Template-based rendering for easy customization, reusable and extensible user controls for deep customization.

Computed Facets - configurable facets ideal for eCommerce websites, providing dynamic calculations of relevant product information such as average or summed prices, as well as filtering by price ranges.

Native integration with leading WCMs - API-Level Integration with Sitecore, SharePoint and SDL Tridion provides support for live indexing, security trimming and metadata search.

Faceted Search and Navigation - More intuitive, complementing traditional keyword searches with guided navigation and conversational search that leverages metadata for increased relevance and precision.

Search Analytics - Provides valuable information about visitor search behavior, content usage (top queries) and gaps in content (unsuccessful queries), offering unparalleled insights into key trends and more agile decision-making.

Indexing

Audio-video Indexing - The speech in audio or video files can be indexed with the optional Audio Video Search module. It creates an accurate transcript of speech content that is aware of the enterprise's vocabulary (i.e. proper names, employee names, domain terms), and allows users to effectively search audio and video content as easily as they search document content. When searching, the exact location of the searched terms are highlighted in the timeline of the audio or video player.

Connector Framework - Connector APIs enable easy integration with most repositories, including a flexible security API to support the security models of the indexed repositories.

Converters - Tens of file formats are supported out of the box, including PDFs, Office documents, Lotus Notes, HTML, XML, Text files, etc. Metadata contained in audio and images file formats is also indexed, while the text contained in images can be index with the optional OCR module.

Languages - Languages are automatically identified at indexing time, improving content processing and relevance algorithms.

Metadata mapping - Regardless of the actual naming for the metadata in the indexed repositories, the system supports configurable mapping to a specified internal field representation. For instance, an index containing both Exchange and Lotus Notes emails will merge the “From” and “To” and “Subject” metadata even if they use different names for these fields.

OCR- The Optical Character Recognition (OCR) module allows the indexing of text content from files such as scanned documents stored in image or PDF files.

Pre/Post conversion scripts - Conversion scripts are hooks in the indexing pipeline that allows administrators to fully customize the way documents are indexed. There are two types of scripts, those that are executed before and those executed after the conversion of the document from its binary representation to indexable metadata and text.

Push API - Provides a simple way to integrate with external systems. All the calls necessary to support all the advanced features of the indexing pipeline are available through this API.

Tagging - Metadata can be injected on documents at search time, enabling search and facets on these new metadata in real-time. An example of usage is the addition of user-created tags on documents.

Security

Document Level Security - Data sources can be configured to index document permissions with content, making Early-binding security possible, or permissions can be set directly for all documents of this source.

Index Security - Security is integrated directly in the index structures to ensure that users only see content they are entitled to see. Early and Late security binding are both handled at the index level to deliver the best performance and security.

Index Segmentation - In addition to the document level securities reflecting the underlying repository permissions, the index can be segmented into collections with their own access restrictions.

Security Freshness - Changes in the group/user structure are constantly monitored and refreshed in Coveo’s security cache. An administrator can also force a refresh of the cache if required

Security Normalization - Securities from different systems are normalized within the index so that users are automatically assigned with all proper security identifiers when accessing Coveo. This ensures that users see all the content they are entitled to see.

Super User Access - The main system administrator can grant temporary and audited rights to a specified user to search and access content for which he normally does not have access rights. Typical uses are e-Discovery, forensic, etc.

Reporting and Analytics

3rd party analytics integration - The Coveo analytics database allows the use of third-party reporting tools for more complex or custom reporting. An administrator can also easily configure the search interfaces to integrate third-party Web Analytics systems such as Google Analytics.

Advanced Query Analytics - Captures data on all user interactions with the search interfaces including result click-through and the use of different search UI functions. Reporting interface allows administrators to analyze the captured data, to elevate the most popular results, or select the correct result, for given queries.

Query & Indexing Logs - Comprehensive reports and statistics with graphical views on system status, queries, content, history, etc. Live console gives administrators a real-time view of what is going on the system.

Text Analytics

Configurable Text Analytics - An administrator can configure a workflow that will create new metadata based on content analysis, rules and context, such as Themes, Named-entities, Regular Expressions.

Incremental updates - An administrator can configure update schedules to capture recent changes in the index.

Interactive Fine Tuning - Extraction parameters, normalization and blacklisting can be refined and metadata regenerated without re-indexing the full documents set.

Named Entity Extraction - Entities such as persons, locations, and organizations are automatically extracted from indexed content. Additional entities can be configured in the system.

Plug-ins - Additional, 3rd party, plugins can be added to the Text Analytics workflow. For example, domain/organization specific taxonomies can be used in the process.

Rule-based Extraction - Configurable rules can be used to add specific metadata to documents.

Theme Extraction - Themes are Topics and Concepts automatically extracted from indexed content.

Next time, I will complete describing Coveo products with Coveo for service and support.

Search Applications-Coveo-Advanced Enterprise Search-Part 2

Yesterday, I mentioned that Coveo offers three products - Coveo for advanced enterprise search, Coveo for advanced website search, Coveo for service and support. I presented the some features of Coveo for advanced enterprise search product.

Today, I will complete presenting this product.

User Interface

Coveo InsightBox - different field values are suggested while a user types a query.

Facets: AND/OR mode - for specific facets, multi-selection can be switch from OR (default) to AND

Facets: Computed Fields - computations can be applied of specific facets: Sums (Avgs, Mins, Maxs).

Facets: Search-as-you-type - search-as-you-type on all unique values of specified facets.

Facets: Sort-by - facet values can be sorted based on their label, count or computed value.

Mobile UI - user Interface compatible with iOS browsers.

Relevance Ranking - results are ordered by default based on user profile, social and other context. This can be easily tuned and configured by an administrator.

Result Sort-by any Field - results can be ordered by any field. This is configured by the administrator.

Secure, Federated search - log in once in Coveo and search, navigate and consolidate dozens of different data sources simultaneously. Trim results based on user permissions.

Sort-by any Field - results can be ordered by any field, as configured by the UI administrator.

Faceted Search and Navigation - relevant metadata and fields can be used to populate facets within a result set. User can select multiple facet values dynamically and get instant changes in the result list.

Advanced User Interface

Export Results to Excel - results can be downloaded and opened in Excel. Administrator can select which metadata to include in the export.

Floating Searchbar - Windows users can activate a floating Search bar and search Coveo without the need to start a Web browser.

Outlook Sidebar - Outlook users get contextual results based on their context and selection. They can also search for emails, files, people and SharePoint without leaving Outlook.

Tagging - users have the ability to add custom tags and annotations to results. Tags are searchable, are applied in the index in real-time and are available to other users.

Widgets - an administrator can configure widgets to display results in advanced visual representation.

Windows Desktop Indexing - Windows users can search their local files and email archives. A desktop agent is required to capture content and synchronize it with the centralized Coveo index.

Relevance

Configurable Ranking - administrator can assign weight on more than 20 ranking attributes, such as Term proximity, TFIDF, dates, Terms in Title, Content reputation.

Query Correction - the spelling of the query is checked against the index content in order to suggest proper spelling even for words that are not normally part of general dictionaries (example: internal project codes, people names, etc.)

Query Ranking Expressions (QRE) - for each UI, an administrator can configure specific ranking rules, based on context and result set. This is an easy and flexible way to promote content based on profile attributes of the current user, such as locations, history, languages, roles.

Stemming - variations of a keyword with a similar basic meaning are treated as synonyms, broadening the search when required.

Thesaurus - an administrator can create a thesaurus and link it to the query. Thesaurus can be created from scratch or imported from existing enterprise content.

Top Results - an administrator can assign specific results to appear at the top of the list for specific queries.

Collaborative/Social ranking - click through data and Manual document rating are used in relevance calculation. This is automatically shared among colleagues based on their social proximity.

Administration and Configuration

Admin Roles - the main system administrator can delegate partial administration permissions based on roles (interface designer, system administrator, collection administrator, etc.)

APIs - administration APIs allow custom development and integration of the administration functions into external systems.

Audience Management - administrator can define multiple audiences and assign specific UIs to them.

Installation Kit - everything is installed and initially configured using an install kit for easy deployment.

Interface Editor - for each User Interface, an administrator can configure Result templates, CSS, Facets, Sort-keys and other parameters.

Monitoring/Email alerts - different system conditions are monitored and email alerts can be sent to report important system events, such a disk space running low.

Web-based Administration UI - simple, Web-based UI for easy administration.

I will describe Coveo for advanced website search in my next post.

Search Applications-Coveo -Advanced Enterprise Search - Part 1

Coveo offers three products - Coveo for advanced enterprise search, Coveo for advanced website search, Coveo for service and support. Today, I am going to present Coveo for advanced enterprise search. This product has many features, so I will start presenting them today and will finish tomorrow.

Coveo for advanced enterprise search is the enterprise search solution that automatically organizes your company’s information into actionable, on-demand knowledge. Coveo's powerful enterprise search engine correlates and analyzes all your company’s data information sources, wherever they reside. All the information in your Sharepoint, CRM, email, Cloud content, and File servers are now instantly accessible from one place.

Features

Access Real-time information from anywhere - federate searches on enterprise, social and cloud data securely and in real time—regardless of format or source.

Transform how your users access information - seamlessly integrate within existing applications and workflows to maximize impact and minimize disruption.

Digest, synthesize and utilize information faster - automatic metadata and entity extraction, themes and tagging combine to help users discover content and share findings.

Navigate content with ease - dynamic, searchable facets provide an ability to navigate to the most relevant content.

Simple to set-up and deploy with existing resources - as easy to use as any consumer web app, coupled with enterprise-grade robustness and scalability.

No hassle security integration - secure configuration out of the box is safe and easy.

Indexing

Audio-video Indexing - the speech in audio or video files can be indexed with the optional Audio Video Search module. It creates an accurate transcript of speech content that is aware of the enterprise's vocabulary (i.e. proper names, employee names, domain terms), and allows users to effectively search audio and video content as easily as they search document content. When searching, the exact location of the searched terms are highlighted in the timeline of the audio or video player.

Connector Framework - connector APIs enable easy integration with most repositories, including a flexible security API to support the security models of the indexed repositories.

Converters - multiple file formats are supported out of the box, including PDFs, Office documents, Lotus Notes, HTML, XML, Text files, etc. Metadata contained in audio and images file formats is also indexed, while the text contained in images can be indexed with the optional OCR module.

Languages - languages are automatically identified at indexing time, improving content processing and relevance algorithms.

Metadata mapping - regardless of the actual naming for the metadata in the indexed repositories, the system supports configurable mapping to a specified internal field representation. For instance, an index containing both Exchange and Lotus Notes emails will merge the "From", "To" and "Subject" metadata even if they use different names for these fields.

OCR - the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) module allows the indexing of text content from files such as scanned documents stored in image or PDF files.

Pre/Post conversion scripts - conversion scripts are hooks in the indexing pipeline that allows administrators to fully customize the way documents are indexed. There are two types of scripts, those that are executed before and those executed after the conversion of the document from its binary representation to indexable metadata and text.

Push API - provides a simple way to integrate with external systems. All the calls necessary to support all the advanced features of the indexing pipeline are available through this API.

Tagging - metadata can be injected on documents at search time, enabling search and facets on these new metadata in real-time. An example of usage is the addition of user-created tags on documents.

Reporting and Analytics

3rd party analytics integration - Coveo analytics database allows the use of third-party reporting tools for more complex or custom reporting. An administrator can also easily configure the search interfaces to integrate third-party web analytics systems such as Google Analytics.

Advanced Query Analytics - captures data on all user interactions with the search interfaces including result click-through and the use of different search UI functions. Reporting interface allows administrators to analyze the captured data, to elevate the most popular results, or select the correct result for given queries.

Query and Indexing Logs - comprehensive reports and statistics with graphical views on system status, queries, content, history, etc. Live console gives administrators a real-time view of what is going on the system.

Scalability and Fault Tolerance

Distributed Indexing - indexing process distributed in many Index Slices, each one indexing part of the content. Slices can be hosted locally (on local drives or on a SAN) or on separate servers (through IP connection) providing highly scalable architecture.

Failover and Query Scalability - index mirroring system provides high availability (if one mirror fails, the others can continue serving queries). The number of queries that can be answered per second can be doubled by doubling the number of automatically synchronized mirrors.

Performance profiles - configurable performance profiles to balance indexing total throughput, query performance and time-to-index.

Query Federation/GDI - federate queries to other instances of Coveo and merge the results from all instances into a single result page while also leveraging the ranking algorithms from the different instances.

Security

Document Level Security - data sources can be configured to index document permissions with content, making early-binding security possible, or permissions can be set directly for all documents of this source.

Index Security - security is integrated directly in the index structures to ensure that users only see content they are entitled to see. Early and late security binding are both handled at the index level to deliver the best performance and security.

Index Segmentation - in addition to the document level securities reflecting the underlying repository permissions, the index can be segmented into collections with their own access restrictions.

Security Freshness - changes in the group/user structure are constantly monitored and refreshed in Coveo’s security cache. An administrator can also force a refresh of the cache if required.

Security Normalization - securities from different systems are normalized within the index so that users are automatically assigned with all proper security identifiers when accessing Coveo. This ensures that users see all the content they are entitled to see.

Super User Access - the main system administrator can grant temporary and audited rights to a specified user to search and access content for which he normally does not have access rights. Typical uses are e-Discovery, forensic, etc.

Text Analytics

Configurable Text Analytics - an administrator can configure a workflow that will create new metadata based on content analysis, rules and context, such as Themes, Named entities, Regular Expressions.

Incremental Updates - an administrator can configure update schedules to capture recent changes in the index.

Interactive Fine Tuning - extraction parameters, normalization and blacklisting can be refined and metadata regenerated without re-indexing the full documents set.

Named Entity Extraction - entities such as persons, locations, and organizations are automatically extracted from indexed content. Additional entities can be configured in the system.

Plug-ins - additional, 3rd party, plugins can be added to the text analytics workflow. For example, domain/organization specific taxonomies can be used in the process.

Rule-based Extraction - configurable rules can be used to add specific metadata to documents.

Theme Extraction - themes are topics and concepts are automatically extracted from indexed content.

More features of this product tomorrow...