Hosted software

A fully outsourced web site search service. Hardware, software upgrades, network traffic, all managed by Funnelback.

Licensed software

Software installed on your own server with a bundled web server for easy setup.

Operating systems supported

Windows Server, Linux (Red Hat), Solaris. Funnelback can run on a variety of platforms allowing you to leverage off of your existing systems.

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

Search many millions of documents with fast query response times.

Federated 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 they 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.

Intranet & internet

Crawls HTTP and HTTPS sites with support for cookies.

Different repository types

Also indexes Oracle, MySQL, MS SQL Server, Lotus Notes, Domino, TRIM and SharePoint. Support for additional document sources can be developed as required.

File shares / Shared drives

Windows, NFS, Novell.

Multiple file types supported

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

Multiple western languages supported

ISO-8859-I languages.

Search Key word searching

Available across document content and metadata.

Features Refine queries

Modify the existing query by adding or removing words, search on the current result set only or use the word stemming operator (include plurals and other word forms) on the current query.

Spelling suggestions

Provides alternatives from the Funnelback dictionary.

Thesaurus suggestions

Provides a list of synonyms.

Featured pages

Specified pages are promoted when triggered by specific keywords.

Ranking

Documents are ranked by their relevance score which takes into account factors such as the relative rarity of the query terms, the frequency with which they occur in the document, the length of the document, URL length and anchor text.

Customise 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.

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.

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).

Advanced querying

A wildcard search uses truncation operators (‘*’) to provide results containing variations of the search terms. Proximity search shows results where query words appear near each other.

Collection level security

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

TRIM, file share, intranet and 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 unauthorized to access a given collection can be redirected to a ‘public’ collection, which will contain publicly accessible content.

Accessibility

Funnelback conforms to AA Web content accessibility guidelines.

Intuitive administration web 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.

HTTPS (for web spidering)

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

Offline indexing

An offline view is maintained for indexing purposes. This insures 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.

Featured pages

Hard coded or ‘best-bets’ results. The search administrator specifies a set of URLs to appear in the results page whenever specific keywords are entered.

Query tuning / Expansion

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

Click data

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

Inclusion and exclusion patterns

Restrictions to the crawl are governed by a set of inclusion and exclusion patterns.

Meta collections

A seamless mechanism for searching over multiple collections. Users can transparently search up to 16 primary collections with a single query.

External metadata indexing

Assign metadata to distributed files 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.

Design results pages

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

Templates

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

Command line interface

Administrators are provided with an extensive set of command line tools for advanced functionality, as an alternative to Funnelback’s web based interface.

Execute external program and custom scripts

via Funnelback’s search & update workflow process. This provides an excellent opportunity to customize the indexing process for those organizations whose business rules won’t work with the out of the box Funnelback architecture. Funnelback easily integrates with other systems.

Results as HTML, XML or RSS.

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.).

Relevant summaries

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

Metadata summaries

Summaries can include metadata fields. Extensive log & 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.

Alternate sort specification

Results are displayed in descending order of relevance, determined by Funnelback’s superior ranking algorithm. Alternatively results can be sorted by date, title, size, URL as well as any other specified metadata class, in ascending or descending order.

Document level highlighting

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

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 document cached view.

Fluster Clustering Engine

Provides users with a set of related sub headings (clusters) related to their

search query. The clusters allow users to determine query refinement suggestions derived from the
content.

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.