Xsearch CEO Norbert Weitkämper Interviewed
January 12, 2009
Weitkämper Technology–based in Staffelsee, Germany–is a search and content processing vendor with a low profile in North America. The firm offers its multi-source search suite that incorporates proprietary technology to deliver fast content and query processing. The company’s XSEARCH package is customizable to focus on the client’s specific need. It offers nine variables: Clustering Engine, Suggest, DidYouMean, Summarizer, Linguistic Engine, Federated Search, Facet Navigator, Entity Extractor and Intelligent Classifier.
The industrial engineer was dissatisfied with the search results available from commercial products. Norbert Weitkämper developed Xsearch after working in electronic publishing. He told Search Wizards Speak:
As we are specialized on search for more than a decade our package is very well tuned; not only for speed but also for content for example. We will combine our new HitEngine with our established technologies like Linguistic, Did-You-Mean, clustering, synonyms and ontologies, or our personal ranking mechanisms. They are already released, we just have to melt them together.
He added:
For the complex roman languages our linguistic engine with its morphologic analysis is a big advantage, because algorithmic approaches like Bayesian or Porter, which are doing a good job for English, are a miserable failure.
On the subject of semantic analysis, Mr. Weitkämper said:
Semantic analysis is much more difficult for European languages than for English. We are already able to integrate thesauri or ontologies. I have not seen any system yet which meets the requirements for semantic analysis – at least when you have a closer look into the system. But storing information in a quick and accessible way is even more important for this approach, as you have to consider much more than only keywords and positions. So I can imagine that our optimized index structure may help also in this field to achieve adequate results in an acceptable amount of time.
More information about the company is available at its Web site, http://www.weitkamper.com. The full text of the interview with Mr. Weitkämper is at http://www.arnoldit.com/search-wizards-speak/xsearch.html.
Stephen Arnold, January 12, 2009
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