As of January, 2012, this site is no longer being updated, due to work and health issues
Search Tools Consulting Services
Help with Site Search, Intranet, and Enterprise Search
using Hosted Search Services, Appliances, Commercial and Open Source Software
Contacting Search Tools Consulting
Avi Rappoport, Principal Consultant
1629 Dwight Way, Mail Code W
Berkeley, CA 94703
phone: (510) 845-2551
or use the contact form
Search Tools Consulting Services
Avi Rappoport, the Principal Consultant, is an authority on site,
Intranet and topical portal search engines. She combines
research in information retrieval with years in the software industry to bring
a practical and straightforward approach to web search and navigation issues.
Rather than assaulting you with jargon, I want to work with you
to make sure that you get the best tools and the fewest problems. Solutions
are tailored to your organizational needs and budget, from relatively small
sites to giant portals and Intranets. I am very user-focused and practical, using technology to that end. I often consult
by telephone, email and instant messaging-- no travel expenses required. Special
packages and rates for non-profit organizations are available.
Search Tools Consulting Can Do:
- Needs Analysis
- Working with you to create a simple overview of your or document collection, and up to a full specification process involving personas and scenarios.
- Product Selection
- Helping you select the search tool that best fits your needs and your budget.
- Implementation
- Working with web production or IT staff to install and configure a search engine, adapt to site-specific content issues, and design the user interface. Using iterative design to catch unanticipated problems.
- Content Improvement
- Discovering and fixing search engine problems, both on site and web search, are caused by content issues. These can include missing and duplicate titles (metadata tag or property), file formats, file sizes, JavaScript and other dynamic links, bitmap text, files sizes, and more.
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- Training and Documentation
- Customizing instruction and documentation for search administration staff.
- Continuing and Incremental Improvements
- Analyzing of existing search engine via user testing, surveys, and log analysis, recommending specific changes.
- Maintenance
- Keeping your search system up and running, reports and metrics, Search Suggestions management, search engine tuning for best results.
Search Tools Consulting Clients
(For my conference presentations, articles and technical documents, see the publications
listing.)
-
Kaiser Permanente -
participated in replacement of Enterprise Search across the entire Kaiser intranet, with an index of about 270,000 pages on over 100 web servers, for 160,000 employees, then extended that to the HR sub-site and an internal best practices site using IBM Vivisimo Velocity. Designed and tested crawling, indexing, query parsing, search retrieval, relevance ranking, user interface and reporting, working closely with the IT department. Managed the API integration with the IBM Web Content Management system using a service-oriented architecture and XML and wrote custom code for search analytics.
-
Kresge Foundation -
implementation of site search engine
including test, staging and production steps. Configured crawling, collections, relevance adjustments, interface to CMS, search reports and ongoing management.
-
Ernst & Young - enterprise search analytics, creating perl and Excel processes for continuing examination of search log data, trends analysis, extended most frequent query discovery, core query taxonomy.
-
KCM - information needs analysis, evaluation of the PostgreSQL full-text search module, research on scanning services, OCR, named entity extraction and semantic analysis, best practices for search functionality and results page interface customized to specific information system requirements.
- ProQuest - extensive research on current data content & interchange standards
- Yodle - research and recommendations for geographic local search using the Solr Lucene search engine.
- Cengage - faceted metadata search consulting
- United States Library of Congress - extensive analysis of current and future search requirements,
metadata integration, user experience improvements, and recommendations.
- Librarian's Index to the Internet - develop specifications and advice on choice of faceted metadata search and browse.
- VeriSign - search engine consulting and configuration for main site, international sites,
intranets and sales extranet (2.5 years).
- Discovery Education - analysis of multimedia search and
architecture requirements.
- Virtuoso - analysis and consulting for database-backed travel site.
- Hewlett-Packard - extensive analysis and recommendations for very large intranet search.
- Blue Shield of California - search engine requirements analysis and implementation.
- QwestDex - online yellow pages, local search, faceted metadata search RFI, RFP and vendor recommendation.
- MIT - site search advice
-
Procter & Gamble - intranet search evaluation
- Librarian's Index to the Internet -
search user interface and spellchecker
- Hewlett-Packard - log file analysis and search implementation analysis for a very large public web site
- National Cancer Institute - help choosing a portal search engine
- Epson America - research on filtering engines
- AlterNet - search engine for a growing topical portal
- 4D Inc., WebSTAR division - analysis of search engine code library
- Qode / NeoMedia - e-commerce online catalog
- Scient - search interface, content integration for health portal
- FirstDoor.com - search engine analysis
- DomainLock - search engine analysis
- KnowIt.com - search engine analysis
- McKinsey - portal search engine advice
- Fair, Isaac - intranet search recommendations
- Salon.com - search analysis and implementation of interface and functional
improvements
- UltimateOffice.com - search engine analysis
- GreatEntertaining.com - ecommerce database-backed site search analysis, log analysis and recommendations
- Working Assets - search engine analysis
- WinStar Office.com - due diligence analysis of search products
- ZotGroup - search engine analysis
- Alternet - search recommendations
- ZDNet - due diligence on search engine
- ProjectCool - search engine analysis
- HealthCentral - search engine recommendations
- iXL - analysis of MP3 file search needs
- DNA Files - search engine implementation
- WorldTrek Odyssey - search engine implementation
Search Vendor and Industry Clients (Full Disclosure)
- LucidImagination - user interface consulting
- SLI Systems - white paper / case study
- Google Search Appliance - edit of their Reviewer Guide
- Fast Search and Transfer (now Microsoft Enterprise Search)- presentations for user groups
- Siderean Faceted Metadata Search - faceted metadata technology analysis
- Ultraseek (when developed by Infoseek
and then Inktomi) - white paper on robot crawling, UI and functionality analyses
- MondoSoft - functionality and interface review, competitive analysis
- AltaVista Enterprise Search functionality and interface review, competitive analysis
- Ripfire (acquired by Plumtree) - analysis and matchmaking
- Maxum (then developer of Phantom, Mac OS search engine) - functionality analysis and market analysis
- Atomz (now owned by Adobe/Omniture) - functionality review and competitive analysis
- Utopy - search functionality consulting
- Ditto.com - image search functionality testing and recommendations
- Cambridge Parallel Processing - research and present web protocols such as URIs, HTML, HTTP, and robots.txt.
- Searchbutton.com (acquired by MondoSoft) - functionality review and competitive analysis
For my conference presentations, articles and technical documents, please see my publications
listing.
Contacting Search Tools Consulting
Avi Rappoport: Principal Consultant
1629 Dwight Way, Mail Code W
Berkeley, CA 94703
contact form
phone: (510) 845-2551
Or, via thumbtack.com
Date Modified: 2011-08-08