Arikus: Going Beyond Search since 1997
March 10, 2008
In Boston, Massachusetts, on, Wednesday, March 5, 2008, a person engaged me and raved about the Arikus search engine. I recall writing about this system in 2002, when I was creating an inventory of Canadian search engines for a client. My contact was, I believe, Markus Gunn, now an advisor to the company. He was a wonderful telephone chat. To be honest, Arikus slipped off my radar until this bouncy cherub gave me the Arikus sales pitch.
The company offers what it calls “enterprise search and categorization.” As you may know, I don’t think too much of the phrase enterprise search. I’ve argued for more than 18 months that enterprise search is a Pandora’s box, leaving most users frustrated and angry about sluggish response, unfindable content, and features that lag Google.com, Live.com, and Yahoo.com by a country mile. The categorization function is not search exactly. It’s one of the rich content processing options introduced to allow user to point and click their way through topics, suggestions, Use For ideas, See Also references. Endeca cranked up the volume on this notion almost a decade ago. Arikus has offered these features for more than a decade, yet the company remains in stealth mode in the US.
Background
Arikus, founded in 1997, was when I first encountered the firm, was a privately-held company. In 2003, Arikus wanted to “help customers manage information.” The focus of the firm and its Canadian and UK technology team was to “develop and market data management technologies that transform unstructured, scatted information into a business asset.” The idea was to “increase the value of business applications”.
The core product used to be the Aire server. Today, the company’s technology is described this way on the firm’s Web site: “Arikus unlocks a company’s information resources, providing knowledge workers and web site visitors with access to the right information, right away….Arikus brings together a company’s external and internal data resources and allows it to use this data on its own terms; automated information management, plain language precision search, and navigation software for self-service applications.”
The company’s principal products are under the “inContext” banner. The products available today include:
- An inContext enterprise solution. A 15-day evaluation version is available via a direct download here.
- An inContext developer solution
- An inContext self-service solution called AnswerIT. A seven-day evaluation version is available by contacting sales at arikus.com
Each of these solutions come with an SDK. Details are located on the Arikus Web sit here. You will have to fill out a form without skipping a field.
Technology
Arikus incorporates a variety of technologies in its system. True to its Cambridge University roots, there’s a heft statistical component. In addition, the company has integrate linguistic technologies as well. The system can handle unstructured information like Word documents and email. Arikus can also process structured data. The user interface can be configured with point-and-click options, a search box, and fill-in-the-blank prompts for parametric searches.
The company makes an interesting claim for its approach. Let me quote from the Arikus Web site:
Arikus technology goes further than any other known industry document ranking technology in delivering accurate, relevant and quality results. Arikus begins by analyzing an end user query to determine word usage, grammatical inflections, phrase structure, and sentence structure. An analysis is performed on target documents to determine how words are distributed in a document and what the relationships are between the words in the document. Sentence analysis is performed to determine both a position-independent and a position-dependent score for each sentence in the document. This step not only improves the accuracy, relevancy, and quality of returned results but also allows for the determination of the “best summary”, that is, the passage that best answers the user’s question. This is entirely unique to Arikus.
I’ve have added bold italic to the assertions that I believe warrant head-to-head testing with other search and content processing solutions.
Taxonomy Support
A plus for Arikus are its taxonomies. You can find information about there here. If you are unsure what a taxonomy’s main headings should be for business, for example, you can cadge these terms from the Arikus PDFs. What a wonderful jump start! Kudos, Arikus.
inContext supports knowledge bases. You can license industry-specific taxonomies from Arikus. Should your organization have a taxonomy, you can use that scheme with your Arikus installation. Arikus’s taxonomies are based on contributions and information from established business, scientific, and commercial publishers.
System in Action
You can see the inContext system in action via the Arikus demonstration located here. The system is limited, and you may want to contact the company directly for a more detailed demonstration. When I tested the system on March 10, I received an error message. However, the original Arikus system results looked like this. Note: this is a screen shot provided by Arikus to me in 2002, and I believe a version of this screen shot appeared in the first edition of the Enterprise Search Report. Arikus is no longer included in the fourth edition, but if you have the first edition at hand, you can see my full write up plus the upsides and downsides of the system based on my analysis in 2002:
Features of this interface include:
- A central results list with a machine-generated summary of the document. I found these summaries useful. The snippets shown in the Google Search Appliance, in contrast, can be cryptic
- A listing of topics in the result set. The number to the right of the concept indicates the number of documents in that topic
- The publication types in the result set
- Authors of documents. Again the number to the right of the author’s name indicates the number of documents by that person
This screen shot from 2002 shows that Arikus’s engineers anticipated the direction of Microsoft SharePoint in general and, in particular, the third-party interface enhancements from Interse in Denmark.
Customers
Arikus provides few clues to its customers. The company has a deal with Liquid Litigation Management Inc. The inContext system is used for litigation document management. LLM uses the system for automatic content aggregation, indexing, key word search, guided search (point-and-click exploration of information), and content categorization. Other customers include Cold North Wind whose bubbling employee prompted me to dig out my Arikus files and Monitor 24-7, Inc. (who in turn sells Arikus powered solutions to Epson Europe and the Mayo Clinic, among other organizations).
Wrap Up
My notes suggest that a version of Arikus once cost about $1,000. You will need to contact the company to get a current price for its various products. Information about the company is available from Alacra, but these often provide high-level information, not the nitty gritty that you probably want. The president of the company is Aris Zakinthinos. You can contact Arikus by calling 1 416 410-8701.
Comments
4 Responses to “Arikus: Going Beyond Search since 1997”
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Arnold –
Please to duly note that the Arikus business taxonomy does not list “software” as a topic under the computing category. Odd omission.
After all, if it were not for software we would not be drowning in such overwhelming volumes of unfindable data.
– David
Please, contact Arikus for specific information about their term lists. These PDFs are selected headings, and I think designed to provide a broad sense of the granularity available, not the full set of headings.
Stephen Arnold, March 11, 2008 4 pm Eastern
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