Continuing my product bashing.. (God I like doing this) this time we will look at UCM search. Search box have become as important as navigation bar for websites. Who has time to go through good old site map. Users come in key in the word and hit search button. Now if you have purchased UCM and building your website you should decide on the search strategy for your website upfront to avoid surprises. People should be educated that out of the box will not work like Google or Yahoo. Oracle has not spent enough time on this. There are enough literature available on Enterprise search and its maturity in ECM products, I am going into that.
But simply put this way; you cannot go with 'out of the box' search functionality. For starters they wont return best results. They return last updated content items. You cannot rig search results. You cannot say, when ever some one searches for a dog, this should be the first result etc. Search key word highlighting is another issue. This requires a customisation.. Lot of other short comings.
So what will you do. Luckily Google comes to rescue here. Wait for some time for Google to index your website and then go for Google Custom search. This is at a nominal fee you can integrate to your website for ad-free search results. Integration is pretty straight forward and requires minimal customisation.
3 comments:
UCM on Oracle 11g Database provides text snippets and search term highlighting without customization.
I also think some of the issues you have rightfully outlined here are/will be addressed by the limited use license that will be available for Secure Enterprise Search when 11g SES comes out.
In the end, you have reminded folks of another option, and that's always a good thing.
What I have understood is that UCM search is better for limited custom search scenarios. SES works for cases where you need to index a lot of data, like a large collection of websites. But you can't do very targeted and personalized searches with SES. Am I right? Do you know any UCM search vs. SES comparison articles? I haven't atleast found any.
Another cool thing about Oracle DB 11g Search is that you get morphology / stemming search. This means that searching for 'cool' will return results with 'coolness', 'cools', 'cooler', 'coolest', etc. All ranked according to the lingual proximity to the search term. This is available OOB, and supports many latin and non latin languages.
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