Fast’s enterprise search system gets updated

Fast Search & Transfer ASA plans to unveil on Monday an upgraded version of its ESP enterprise search system which the Oslo company says features an improved ability to interpret queries and return results.

When dealing with queries, ESP 5 is faster and more precise than the platform’s current version, thanks to a new technology the company calls Contextual Insight designed to improve the relevancy of search results.

With Contextual Insight, ESP 5 can analyze documents in a more granular fashion than the system could before, and extracts a broad variety of metadata information, such as names, phone numbers and geographic locations.

It also detects contextual information that indicates things such as physical locations and query patterns, which it then factors into the query’s resolution, so that it can provide users with the answers they are looking for.

Sharpening the query resolution precision in an enterprise search tool is of utmost importance, said Andrew McKay, vice president of product marketing.

“Imagine litigation protection environments. Litigation protection isn’t about relevant results. It’s about going through hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of documents and finding three e-mails that save you in a court case,” he said.

Designed for large organizations that have a lot of data stored in a wide variety of disparate repositories, ESP 5 gives users what the company calls “an integrated point of access” to structured, unstructured and multimedia data in its corporate servers.

ESP can scale to search petabytes of data and billions of documents. It is designed to run on low-cost hardware and has load-balancing and fault-tolerance capabilities to maintain consistent levels of availability.

ESP 5 is certified on a variety of operating systems, including Microsoft Corp.’s Windows 2000 (SP3) and Windows 2003, Red Hat Inc.’s Enterprise Linux 3.0 and 4.0, Novell Inc.’s Suse Linux 9, Sun Microsystems Inc.’s Solaris 9 and 10, Hewlett-Packard Co.’s HP-UX 11i on PA-RISC and Itanium and IBM Corp.’s AIX 5.2 and 5.3.

ESP 5 will be available Monday, but pricing was not announced.