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ZyLAB’s Dr. Johannes Scholtes Interviewed

May 5, 2008

ZyLAB’s chief executive officer, Dr. Johannes Scholtes, said in an exclusive interview for the “Search Wizards Speak” series that the company has more than 7,500 licensees world wide. This customer base puts the company on a par with search sector leaders Autonomy, Fast Search & Transfer (Microsoft), and Google.

He told ArnoldIT.com, sponsor of the Search Wizards Speak series:

Our approach has been to say to our customer, “Here’s our list of components. Just select the ones you need. You pay only for these, so we don’t ask our customers to pay huge fees for functions that will never be used.” Our modular approach is now mature, and I see more vendors in Europe and the US emulating what we’ve been doing for a long time. Our customers tell us our “couple-of-day” deployments are very unusual. For us, fast deployment is business as usual for us. These three and six month installation efforts are problems for many organizations, and these become great sales leads for us.

The failure of key word search to meet the needs of today’s organizations is becoming more well-known. ZyLAB, according, to Dr. Scholtes has pushed beyond the search box. He said:

In the basic search, a user can see the number of hits for a query, hit-density ranking, file date and time for creation, modification, and access. There are many other features in basic mode. For advanced search, you can rank on automatically extracted entities, including names, companies, countries, measurements, dates, monetary amounts, and named-phrases. You can rank by semantic relevance using an automatically derived taxonomy or your own taxonomy. Results can be personalized. You can organize result lists in a variety of ways. You can run a query on a linguistic pattern like “a person got a job” and then rank results in these patterns higher than hits in the full text. Through all this additional meta information, we can support clustering, full text similarity inside documents where precision and recall can be set.

He made the point that ZyLAB’s relevance ranking algorithms are not locked up like those from other well-known vendors.

You can read the full interview on the ArnoldIT.com Web site in the Search Wizards Speak section of the ArnoldIT Web site. This is the 12th interview in the series. An index of the previous interviews is here.

Stephen Arnold, May 5, 2008

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under enterprise, interview, news, search, text processing 

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