Search Accuracy Sharpened

New search and knowledge management products from Entopia Inc., Divine Inc. and iPhrase Technologies Inc. are vying for IT managers attention with promises that they will make it easier to organize information and get more accurate search results as a consequence.

Version 1.4 of Entopias Quantum knowledge management software, to be unveiled this week, includes tighter integration with e-mail and workflow applications, as well as the ability to integrate structured with unstructured data, such as to populate numerical fields on forms.

New e-mail integration features give users the ability to send or copy messages to Quantum folders. Version 1.4 adds support for IBMs Lotus Software divisions Notes clients and an interface with Microsoft Corp.s Outlook task list.

Other new features include an enhanced Windows-centric user interface, support for full-text and concept- based searches, as well as synonyms and word stemming in search. Enhanced version control lets users view the complete history of actions performed on a particular file, according to Entopia officials in Belmont, Calif.

The U.S. Navys Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, in San Diego, is using the Web-based version of Quantum as the basis for its Virtual Information Center Technology Open Source Requirements knowledge management product. Hiekeun Ko, engineer and principal investigator at the center, cited the new version for its improved Windows XP interface as well as the new version control features.

"The current version just allows users to read documents and make comments," Ko said. "Now theyll be able to edit the documents in a shared environment."

Meanwhile, Chicago-based Divine is ramping up its search technology with the release this week of SinglePoint Search, a browser-based enterprise search engine that features integrated results from corporate databases and the Internet. It provides a taxonomy that can organize information around more than 17,000 subject concepts, automatic classification by the most appropriate subjects and results presentation, and relevance ranking that can take into account multiple search scenarios.

Last week, iPhrase released the latest version of its OneStep natural language search application, with improvements in accuracy and scalability and new reporting features. OneStep 3.5 can deliver results with up to 85 percent relevancy, 95 percent with tuning, according to iPhrase officials in Cambridge, Mass. This version can automatically break results down into separate categories for less specific queries.

Other new features include automatic extraction of meaning from new data and documents added to an intranet and new reports that can identify trends in user requests, as well as gaps between user requests and content.