Verity unveils K2 Enterprise 5.5

Verity on Monday rolled out Release 5.5 of its K2 Enterprise search and classification software, adding query analytics and event-driven indexing into the search mix.

Release 5.5 delivers the K2E Advanced Query Analytics system, which provides real-time analysis of the ways people use search and classification software. It gives administers system usage and performance information such as types and trends of user queries and what content is being accessed most often. Administrators can act on the finding to adjust content, metadata, or presentation, according to Verity officials.

Analytics is important in search software to give feedback to administrators to do system tuning, according to Scott Whitney, Verity’s director of product management.

“We are now providing the ability to control the types of views you want,” Whitney said. “We want to make it easy for administrators to see what is going on so they can make changes. How many documents are in a certain category or a subcategory? These are ticks to change the math that moves documents around. Analytics enable this.”

Event-driven indexing helps complete the feedback loop for administrators by getting the right documents to the right users. Before, in order to insert a document into the search index you had to wait for a spider to come around and discover the new content, Whitney said.

With event-driven indexing capabilities, as new content is created it can be automatically inserted into the enterprise data index and made available to users in real time, Verity officials said.

Other new features in K2 Enterprise 5.5 include session-based recommendations, which can suggest relevant documents and experts based on the current query or item that a user is viewing. The Query-based summaries function, meanwhile, provides the ability to answer a user’s search query without requiring the user to open a document. It dynamically generates document summaries based on a user query and shows the context in which the query terms appear in the document.

“This helps the user quickly see if the answer answers [their] question,” Whitney said.