Every day, millions of searches are performed using the Velocity Search Platform. In observing the search behavior of so many end-users, we've learned a little secret. It turns out that whether a person is at home or at work, they expect their search tools to not only find what they are looking for quickly, but to be intuitive and user-friendly, too—traits not often found in software designed specifically for the enterprise, including search. Velocity provides a wide variety of navigational elements that can be customized to fit any environment. Powerful personalization and collaboration options allow for maximum end-user adoption and satisfaction. And global access options mean that Velocity can be deployed across the world in multiple languages and across many devices.

Navigation

The Velocity search interface is simple, uncluttered, and easy to use. But even better are Velocity's search results. Instead of returning just the first ten results of hundreds or thousands on the search results page, it organizes search results visually to give users the big picture for a faster, more thorough exploration of search results. Simple, yet powerful controls such as the ability to navigate by topical categories created on the fly (clustering), by metadata or facets, by data repository, by entity and by numerical graphs all on the same interface put users in command of their own search experience. In one quick glance, users can see the entire range of search results organized for easy drill-down and navigation that zeroes in on what they are searching for and helps weed out irrelevant information. And as users explore search results, they can preview search results without ever having to leave the page and keep track of where they are at all times via interactive breadcrumbs.

Personalization

In addition to providing the widest array of navigational capabilities in the market, Velocity also allows each user to personalize their search experience. Search administrators can set up a role-based solution that enables specific users or groups of users to view result sets that are tailored to their specific goals. At the group or individual level, both relevancy weightings and navigational options can be configured to best fit user needs. Individual users can also set up alerts — thereby automating any routine search queries they may conduct. Once alerts are set up, users are notified through email about any new content indexed by the system that matches a given query. These alert emails provide the link to matching content, so users can see fresh content without ever having to return to the search interface.

Collaboration

While unified access of information is the main goal of most enterprise search deployments, finding and accessing content is most useful if you can also take action on it in some way by collaboration — i.e. reusing others work without the need to re-create it, building upon existing knowledge and disseminating information to others. End-users can vote on whether or not search results are relevant and rate results using a numerical scale. This information can then be used to adjust relevancy of results in real-time benefiting everyone else in the organization, or can be used to just convey feedback to others. Users can also tag search results with keywords, save search results into personal or shared virtual folders and add their own knowledge or ideas about information found via search directly into the search result itself in the form of free-text annotation.

Users can also search for experts within their organization by viewing profiles of colleagues pulled from a variety of different repositories in the form of a mash-up which can display such things as pictures, contact information, biographical data and recent tagging activity in one single view. Dashboards provide a visual map of hot topics within groups, departments or across the entire enterprise, based upon information has been tagged, saved or shared, providing a window into the collective intelligence of the organization.

Global Access

Velocity provides multi-lingual support for over 60 languages including Arabic, Chinese, English, Danish, Dutch, Farsi, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and many others.

Velocity also offers the ability not only to view results on an individual's desktop but also on their mobile device. Velocity for Mobile optimizes search results for mobile environments to include all major mobile operating systems and mirrors the key end-user features of Velocity Enterprise, such as clustered results and data call-outs for quick referencing. Users are presented with relevant results and effective navigation to find information quickly by category, topic, tag or repository.