Features

Funnelback is a feature-rich search solution with high quality out of the box rankings, customisable results presentation, Contextual Navigation, Faceted Navigation, flexible reporting and a highly usable administration interface. For more detail on these, and additional, features of Funnelback search, click on the feature categories below.

  • Key Features of Funnelback Search

    High quality and tunable ranking algorithm

    The algorithm determines search results by applying various ranking criteria. Ranking can be automatically and manually tuned to increase the value of search results to suit your business and user requirements.

    Intuitive administrative interface for configuration and reporting

    Funnelback is managed via a highly usable, browser-based administration interface. The interface allows the search administrators to have complete control over ranking, features, styling and reporting.

    Flexible Results Presentation

    Funnelback search results are presented in a completely customisable, user friendly format and can use in-built features such as Faceted Navigation and Contextual Navigation to improve the usability of the results page.

    Speed and Scalability

    The Funnelback search engine can index millions of documents with fast query response times.

    Development Platform

    Funnelback can be used as a platform for developing complex search applications such as multimedia search, (including video, audio and images), related content (e.g. related news stories), e-commerce, geospatial search, email based media alerts and plagiarism detection systems.

    Contextual Navigation

    Contextual Navigation allows users to navigate search results via dynamic sub-topics, which are derived from the content without the need for metadata.

    Faceted Navigation

    Funnelback uses metadata fields or other structured information to provide users with related options for refining their query, by file type, for example.

    Funnelback’s Pattern Analyser

    Funnelback's Pattern Analyser senses changes in market demand and enables performance based management. It can measure the effectiveness of a marketing campaign by reporting the magnitude and duration of a spike in search traffic.

  • Capability

    Combined full-text & metadata search

    Allows search over unstructured data with a sophisticated ranking algorithm returning high quality results. Use metadata to up weight results or deliver faceted and geospatial searching.

    Scalability & speed

    Search many millions of documents with fast query response times.

    Enterprise search

    Search many repositories enterprise-wide with a single query via a simple web interface. Separate indexes for each repository are created and users are able to choose which repositories to search over.

    Integration

    Integrates with Content Management Systems and Portals.

    Geospatial search

    Search results with spatial data presented on a map.

    Multimedia search

    Search audio and video metadata.

    RSS or subscription search

    Allows users to keep up to date.

  • Search Features

    Key word searching

    Available across document content and metadata.

    Spelling suggestions

    Provides alternatives from the Funnelback dictionary.

    Thesaurus suggestions

    Provides a list of search suggestions based on a custom thesaurus.

    Featured pages

    Specified pages are promoted when triggered by specific keywords.

    Ranking

    Documents are ranked by their relevance score.

    Customisable ranking

    Boost the rankings of important sites or pages. Up-weight or down-weight metadata, search a query term in a URL or use the ‘same site suppression’ feature to create a valuable diversity of results from different content.

    Sorting of search results

    Results can alternatively be sorted by date, title, size, URL as well as any other specified metadata class, in ascending or descending order.

    Contextual Navigation

    Provides users with a set of sub topics related to their search query without the need for metadata. The sub topics provide users with query refinement suggestions derived from the content.

    User click feedback

    Provides a mechanism for search users to influence the result relevance over a period of time. By monitoring the search patterns of users, and the documents which they go on to access, Funnelback can up-weight these documents for the particular query.

    Synonyms

    Provides the ability to expand query terms or create synonyms to match up with an organisation’s terminology.

  • Administration

    Intuitive web administration interface

    Create, configure and monitor the status of managed collections.

    Crawler and indexer configuration

    Provides the ability to create new collections, specify spider rules and start/stop the crawling process, all from a single administrative web interface.

    Offline indexing

    An offline view is maintained for indexing purposes. This ensures that search operations aren’t affected whilst the collection is being updated. Once it is updated it’s switched to the live view.

    Full/Incremental index update

    Updates to the collections can be triggered through the administrative web interface including; Full update (a complete crawl from scratch); Restart crawl from the latest checkpoint; Filter: extracts textual information from specific file formats; Index: indexes the existing offline crawl data and then swaps the live and offline views; and Swap views: swaps the live and offline views.

    Scheduled updates of indexes

    Provides the ability to schedule the updating of collections on an hourly, daily, weekly and monthly basis.

    Inclusion and exclusion patterns

    Restrictions to the crawl are governed by a set of inclusion and exclusion patterns. External metadata indexing. Assign metadata to index records using a central configuration. Assign additional metadata to other pages.

    Index freshness

    Crawls can be set to update only parts of the index which have changed since the last crawl and create a balance between freshness and infrastructure load.

  • Funnelback Pattern Analyser and Reporting

    Pattern Analyser

    Automatic reports on changes in market demands. Funnelback’s Pattern Analyser can measure the effectiveness of a marketing campaign by reporting the magnitude and duration of a spike in search traffic. It can also provide intelligence on the geographic regions where the change in search pattern is occurring and can provide context by linking each change to online news articles on a related topic.

    Extensive query reports

    Monitor search behaviour and usage over a short or extended period of time. These include: monthly summary of queries, most commonly searched for keywords, top scopes used in queries, query terms which return zero results, queries per hour and documents per site. Date based reporting is also available.

    Data reports

    Provide statistics and reports on data gathered during the update process.

  • Customisable User Interface

    User interface templates

    Use templates as a starting point to customise the search interfaces or developers can tailor the pages to suit individual organisations.

    Results as HTML, XML or RSS

    Search result tiers. Results are grouped into tiers based on how many search constraints the results have satisfied. Tiers are sorted in descending order with regard to the number of constraints satisfied (e.g. fully matching, matching 1/ 2, etc.).

    Contextualised summaries

    Results summaries relate to the current query with optional query highlighting.

    Metadata summaries

    Summaries can include metadata fields.

    Cached document word highlighting

    Provides a cached view of the selected result with search term highlighting.

    Cached document view

    Indexed documents are cached as part of the indexing process and are stored as plain text documents so binary formats such as PDF, Word etc. can be viewed as html through a standard browser. Search terms can also be highlighted with this cached document view.

    Accessibility

    Funnelback conforms to AA Web content accessibility guidelines.

    Design results pages

    Search results can be customised to match your required look and feel.

  • Query Language

    Fielded search

    Search metadata fields sourced from the indexed documents. DC (Dublin Core), AGLS (Australian Government Locator Service) and Netscape metadata are supported by default or define your own which correspond to a URL prefix.

    Numeric field searching

    Range searching of numeric fields.

    Scoped Search

    A customised search enabling results to be restricted based on a set of inclusion and exclusion patterns.

    Boolean search

    Boolean operators provide the user with a simple means to combine words, phrases and sub queries with Boolean operators, to either widen or narrow a result set.

    Phrase searching

    Use the phrase operator which requires component words to appear consecutively and in the order specified.

    Date query

    Allows user to constrain the results to documents which were last modified within a given date range. Word stemming. Stemming (grammatical variations) allow the users to search for common variants of the specified word(s). Wildcard search. A wildcard search uses truncation operators (‘*’) to provide results containing variations of the search terms. Proximity search. Proximity search shows results where query words appear near each other.

  • Content Repositories

    Intranet & internet

    Crawls HTTP and HTTPS sites with support for cookies.

    Different repository types

    Also indexes Shared Drives (Microsoft and Novell), Oracle, MySQL, MS SQL Server, Lotus Notes/Domino, SharePoint 2003/2007/2010, TRIM, Microsoft Exchange, Alfresco, Documentum, MatrixOne, FTP, Quickplace, IBM Content Manager, DB2, FileNet, Websphere, Interwoven, IRIS Archea, JCR, Open Text, Oracle Stellent, Symantec Enterprise Vault, WebDAV and Xerox Docushare. Support for additional document sources can be developed as required.

    File shares

    Windows & NFS.

    Multiple file types supported

    Including HTML, XML, Text, PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel and RTF. Ability to plug in custom filters.

    Multiple languages supported

  • Security

    Collection level security

    Security controls that restrict access to sensitive information in repositories and business applications to authorised users.

    TRIM, file share and intranet document level security

    Funnelback supports NTLM authentications for searching TRIM and NTFS based shared drives.

    Access restriction

    Enables access to individual collections to be restricted on an IP address/hostname basis.

    Collection redirection

    Search users who are unauthorised to access a given collection can be redirected to a ‘public’ collection, which will contain publicly accessible content.

    HTTPS

    Secure sites can be crawled by providing user credentials required by the web servers.

    NTLM

    Secure searching of information protected by NTLM.

  • Customer Satisfaction

    Accessibility

    Access all content via a single web interface.

    Speed / Highly efficient

    Fast indexing and query processing.

    Customisable

    Every step of the Funnelback workflow can be expanded and customised.

    Integration

    Seamlessly integrates into your business interface.

    Leading edge technology

    The technology was developed by CSIRO, Australia’s premier scientific and industrial research organisation. Heavy investment in research and development continues.

    Tailored to your needs

    Funnelback resolves complex search problems which are not solved by a one size fits all system, no matter how large or small your organisation.

    Quality customer service and support

    A dedicated support team with access to research and development resources on site. 24/7 support packages available.