Noetix: Learn Something New Everyday

August 23, 2009

I received a news release from Noetix Corp. The write up contained a piece of information that was new to me and somewhat surprising. First, you will want to read the news release “Noetix Search Named KMWorld Trend Setting Product for 2009”. Then navigate to the Noetix Web site and use the search box on the site to run the query “Noetix search”. Here are the results:

As I clicked through these results, it became evident that the news release was not indexed by the Noetix search system. I find this interesting for several reasons:

I did not know that Noetix had shifted from its roots as an Oracle centric software company. I am behind the curve I learned. Search is part of Noetix business intelligence and appears to be a subset of a larger system.
If an sales person at Noetix were on a sales call and the prospect asked, “Where is the news release about being a trend setting product, the Noetix system would not return that hit using my query string?” I find this an issue when current information are needed by employees and those vetting a company’s products. I expected news to be indexed and available from the Noetix site itself. Business intelligence requires fresh, if not real time, content processing. Can a repository based system deliver real time indexing?
The performance of the Noetix search system when I ran my test queries struck me as sluggish. I am not sure how a company in the search and business intelligence business can deal with sluggish performance, but I grew impatient waiting for results, clicking through text links, and the dismal relevance scores. The most relevant document in the test set was 37 percent relevance.

My question, “Shouldn’t a vendor of search have a system that returns documents about search with a relevance in the 90 percent plus range?” As a trend setter, I need more “trendy” precision and recall. Facets would help as would suggested queries. Take a gander at Noetix. Formulate your own assessment about timely business intelligence systems.

Stephen Arnold, August 23, 2009

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under News, Search, Technology

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.