Intelligent search with Attivio

As much as people talk about information relevance in search, it's not much good unless tied to an activity. Attivio is seeking to solve this problem with its Active Intelligence Engine. Rather than restricting itself to one or a small number of data types, Attivio is providing an enterprise search sieve for multiple data types that can then be deployed to solve specific problems. One example problem might be increasing order value by ensuring finer grained product relevance based on real time market events. Depending on the requirement, data can be taken from enterprise applications, databases, documents and content creation engines like CMS's.

This is no mean feat but the company believes it has found a way of making search relevant by bringing the fuzziness of search together with the precision of SQL querying.  This ideahas led to a product that allows business to navigate and explore data in order to find the most relevant pieces related to the job in hand.

Google doesn't do this. It presents a range of possibilities but struggle when given complex queries. It cannot for example cluster based on commonalities.

In enterprise environments, search is often characterized by the way people look for related information in the context of events or processes with which they are interacting. In order to make search as relevant as possible, Attivio offers an initial consultancy and then sets up a data mashup agent that learns how people search and the kinds of information they then use. It does this by tracking clicks across all data sources the user groups touch.

Attivio is at an early stage but is seeing strong interest to solve the types of problem outlined above. In its most recent, embedded form, Attivio only takes up 10MB of disk, can index 100 million documents per server with the index typically taking up 20-40% of the source data.

While implementations are presently measured in months, Attivio expects to compress this down to weeks as the service is developed. Current pricing, which depends on the demands made on the system and type of configuration range from $2,000 to $50,000 per month.