Do Vendors Use Their Own Products? A Peek at Vivisimo’s Intranet Search
In a Gilbane blog post, Lynda Moulton offers great advice to purchasers of enterprise search:
“I keep wondering how many enterprise search vendors use the technologies they build and sell to support their rapidly growing enterprises. That’s a great question to ask your potential search vendor as you decide what tools to procure for your enterprise. Get them to tell you how they use their tools and the benefits they see in their own enterprise. If they aren’t at least using their own search technology in their customer relationship management and technical support knowledge-base operations, think carefully about what that might mean concerning ease of deployment and utilization.”
I’ll take the bite. We at Vivisimo use our own Velocity product for these critical operations:
- Our own intranet search, which indexes our internal electronic content including email, bug reports, support inquiries, etc. A screenshot on the innocuous query birthday is adjacent here. Note that the search engine has authenticated me, obviously so I can search my own email but no one else’s. I use our intranet search a lot, especially for searching my email records and for searching resumes. (More about email search in a future post.)
- Our own consumer web search at http://clusty.com. Clusty is a profit center for Vivisimo as well as a marketing vehicle. Clusty is entirely deployed with Velocity. Here are interesting search results for the query “use their own products” OR “use its own products”.
- Site search at our corporate site. Due to legacy uses of Vivisimo.com for consumer web search, we have placed our site search only at interior pages. Here are search results on the (rather unlikely) query search. Due to the modest amount of content at our corporate site, the clustering is done on the pages’ meta-data rather than the free text of the title and snippets.
- Our internal product knowledgebase for frequently asked questions, which deploys Velocity for its search but with a unique search interface that lets the technical team insert or update knowledgebase entries.
Eating one’s own dog food is the common idiom. We lap it up.
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