Search Tools Product Report

Netrics Search (formerly LikeIt)

Product Information

Platform: Sun Solaris, Linux, Windows 2000/XP, AIX, HP/UX, VMS; remote ASP service available as well.
Price: per-CPU starts at $10,000; ASP service starts at $500/month

• Includes an indexing robot for site searching.
• Also indexes database records.
• Performs pattern-matching on parts of words, even when users make spelling errors or typos.
• Focuses on search expansion: finds all matches to all elements of a search.
• Uses innovative color highlighting to express matching characteristics.
• Can run locally or remotely, hosted at Netrics.
• Also available as an ANSI C code library, C++, COM, Java, Visual Basic, ColdFusion
• Automatic support for all 20+ Latin-1 languages. Custom support for 30+ other ISO 8859 languages.

Articles & Reviews

• When Searching Is No Longer Enough. Internet Retailer; April 2002 by Kurt Peters
  Discusses online store search engines: Mercado, EasyAsk, Endeca, and Netrics, referring to the 2001 Forrester report. Describes customer needs for technology that allows both searching and browsing by category or product attribute. Includes evidence of the good results at Tower Records with Endeca, but finds few examples of faceted metadata usage. Includes additional references to studies of e-commerce search engine demands and limits, suggesting significant changes from the traditional "relevance ranking" approach. Changes include recognizing the problems of a long search result, redirecting searches for brands or products not carried to similar available products, sorting and drilling down on product attributes, spelling correction and synonyms

• A Wave Of Innovations Heats Up Site Search (customer access required) Forrester TechStrategy Brief, March 1, 2002 by Harley Manning with Christopher Mines
  Describes several new features of site search including better relevance as pioneered by the public Google search engine and the Google Search Appliance (does not cover whether it works in controlled link environments), improved forgiveness to handle misspellings and mismatched vocabularies as implemented by Netrics, automated intelligence - classification and categorization engines such as Autonomy and the new ClearForest, and creative pricing, mentioning EasyAsk, which in one installation, received a percentage of increased revenue. Describes the market difficulties including the high number of vendors and shrinking corporate site budgets.
  

• Text-search Engine Tolerates Imprecision (customer access required, or contact Netrics) Seybold Reports, February 2002 by Peter Dyson
  Netrics Search (previously LikeIt) handles paraphrases, missing words and misspellings, while still responding quickly to requests. It allows incremental updating of the searchable index, and handles structured data such as product catalogs.

• LIKEIT Search Software for Business and E-commerce Applications Database Trends; May 2001 (not online)
  Description of the software, quotes from the CEO comparing LikeIt to spellcheckers as utility software.
  
• The LikeIt Intelligent String Comparison Facility NEC Research Institute Technical Report, May 1997 by Peter N. Yianilos and Kirk G. Kanzelberger
  Describes the basic algorithm for comparing strings and calculating similarities, based on previous work on spellcheckers. Provides detailed information on calling the function, how to make the source, and analysis of the performance.

Examples