Cognos to launch enterprise search engine

27.03.2006
Cognos Monday joined the fray with those companies that seek to offer the enterprise better behind-the-firewall search capabilities. In recent weeks, Oracle launched a new in-house search engine and Google a new enterprise search appliance.

The Cognos Go capability, which indexes all of the metadata in a report, will allow a non-technical user to dig out information embedded within a report. According to Dan Vesset, research director of analytics and data warehousing at IDC, this is not typical of business intelligence search engines.

"Before this you could search by report titles only. All the BI vendors have pretty much the same thing," said Vesset.

Similar to a Yahoo or Google search, the search results are ranked by relevance.

What all of the new enterprise search capabilities appear to be about is the integration of both structured and unstructured search capability. With Cognos Go, the BI vendor will be deploying the same kind of search technology used by the major search vendors for unstructured data and applying it to the structured world of data warehouse information.

"The algorithm we designed looks at keywords used in reports, descriptions, [and] titles and ranks it by relevance," said Paul Hulford, product marketing manager at Cognos.