San Jose – Nov. 7, 2007 – Dieselpoint, Inc. a leader in enterprise search, announced a major advancement today in scalability and performance for faceted navigation. For the first time, it is possible to build facets across terabyte-scale document collections.
“Faceted navigation” enables users to see a list of categories along the side of a search results page. For example, a corporate intranet search could show documents broken down by author, date, department, or category.
Dieselpoint’s advancement makes it possible to show facets when the number of documents runs into the millions and the amount of data runs into the tens or hundreds of terabytes. The software runs on commodity hardware typically found in corporate data centers.
“Building facets across large document collections is an exceptionally difficult problem in computer science,” said Chris Cleveland, CEO of Dieselpoint. “This is the reason that Google doesn’t do it. How useful would it be to see categories on a search engine results page?”
Competitive offerings offer facets only across smaller document collections, or limit the categories shown only to those that pertain to the first few hundred results. This approach has limited value as corporate intranets grow larger.
Dieselpoint also announced some additional features in the new version 4.0:
- Significant increase in indexing speed, six times faster than competitive products
- A new reporting module that shows what users searched for, with trends over time
- Easier distributed search based on open standards
- An expanded query language, additional security features, and improved linguistic analysis
Dieselpoint has also opened the source code to large portions of the product, making it easier for customers with special needs to customize the software.