Active Navigation seeks to improve portal search results

ATTEMPTING TO STRENGTHEN search capabilities in enterprise intranets and portals, Active Navigation, formerly known as Multicosm, this week introduced a content management and search technology that offers advanced navigation and categorization functionality.

Portal Maximizer 2 is designed to automatically categorize and analyze site content, helping corporate employees and partners access relevant information quickly, according to company officials. The product analyzes content to identify the most important concepts and then indexes and links content on the fly without the need for HTML coding. Portal Maximizer integrates with existing publishing workflow products and Web security solutions.

Enterprises are struggling with the task of organizing volumes of information published to their intranets, portals, and public Web sites, according to Dabney Standley, vice president of marketing and U.S. operations at Active Navigation, which as its U.S. headquarters in San Francisco. This struggle is "an information problem, not a technology problem," he said.

A finer grain of search and navigation on internal and external sites is needed to counter the problem, Standley said.

"It has been hard for users to interact with the search box on [intranet and portal] sites. Most people only type in a few words, and then they are left with a list, which may or may not be relevant to their search," Standley said.

According to one analyst, containing the growing jungle of information is an increasingly difficult issue for corporations.

"The problem of categorizing and quickly accessing information in corporate enterprises is getting worse. Enterprises had been used to databases containing structured data. The Web has made unstructured data a lot more accessible and therefore something corporations have to put out," said Guy Creese, research director for Internet analytics at Aberdeen Group, in Boston.

"Now, Web sites with content management systems suddenly have this voracious appetite for content that also needs to be categorized. The better I can categorize content, really the better search becomes, and that is where Active Navigation comes in. Being able to correctly categorize documents is a requirement for really [handling] this Web-enabled world," Creese said.

Version 2 of Portal Maximizer adds four new features to the first release of the product, which provided content cross-referencing functionality.

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