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Information Retrieval

The problem

Modern commercial, government and educational organisations face three major search problems:

1. Attracting customers and stakeholders to their websites via public search engines such as Yahoo, Google, and MSNSearch.

2. Ensuring that visitors to the site can find the information and services they are looking for.

3. Ensuring that employees can efficiently find the information and services they need to do their jobs.

The implications

Poor website searchability and poor quality local search can cause major losses of revenue for companies who do business via the web. It also causes lost opportunities for all organisations who publish via the web. See our paper on the searchability of online bookstores: "Buying bestsellers online: A case study in search and searchability".(PDF) [Slides]

IDC White Papers, Jakob Nielsen studies and industry case studies reveal the enormous hidden costs of poor quality internal search. Poor quality search costs money in lost employee productivity and in re-creating information which already existed but couldn't be found. These studies estimate that lost productivity from this cause can cost large organisations tens of millions of dollars per year.

Our response

CSIRO has significant expertise in evaluating both quality of search engines and searchability of enterprise webs. We have also developed a fully featured enterprise search engine for web sites, portals, e-commerce and customer services – P@NOPTIC^® Enterprise Search.

The P@NOPTIC search engine is oriented towards corporate and government intranets and portals but can be used in almost any web search application. P@NOPTIC supports all common metadata formats and can be customised to meet an organisation’s individual needs.

P@NOPTIC is currently in use on a commercial basis in many Australian and international organisations including: the Australian Government, the Australian Stock Exchange, Westpac, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), NineMSN, the University of Staffordshire and NRC Canada.

The P@NOPTIC team has an international reputation in information retrieval research including web search evaluation, test collection development, efficient and effective retrieval and distributed information retrieval (metasearch).

Research is currently underway in the areas of search types, subject-specific search, realistic applications of metasearch, topic distillation, website searchability and search in support of e-commerce.

The P@NOPTIC search technology is also incorporated into CSIRO’s unique Continuous Media Web, and can be used to search video, audio and other time-continuous media.

More Information on Information Retrieval