The US-based Johns Hopkins Institutions have standardised some 1 000 websites on Verity Ultraseek, the enterprise search engine from Verity, a leading provider of enterprise software that helps organisations maximise the return on their intellectual capital investment.
The Johns Hopkins Institutions, a highly regarded university and healthcare facility, first deployed Ultraseek technology a few years ago after an ABC News television programme profile of the Johns Hopkins medical facility generated a dramatic rise in queries to its main external medical systems website.
"That sudden onslaught of traffic generated by the ABC News television programme made us realise we needed a better and more powerful search engine. After extensive evaluation of several vendors` search technology, we found Ultraseek to be the best way to meet our immediate and long-term needs," says Brian Cole, a senior systems software engineer with The Johns Hopkins Institutions` Enterprise Services.
"Ultraseek was able to solve our pressing challenge, and we saw it as an effective search solution for all the websites across the Johns Hopkins organisation. The product`s ease of deployment was as important as finding information easily and quickly."
As part of a drive to optimise IT resources in the two entities, Cole sought to standardise the search engine by encouraging the use of Ultraseek on the external and internal sites operated by different Johns Hopkins departments. In a short period of time, administrators and users of the different departments` websites at The Johns Hopkins Institutions recognised the effectiveness of Ultraseek. Today, Verity Ultraseek is the de facto search engine for the hundreds of websites at Johns Hopkins.
There is considerable crossover content between the academic and healthcare operations. For example, the university`s faculty and students in the schools of medicine, public health and nursing search content residing on sites maintained by The Johns Hopkins Hospital. Verity Ultraseek permits rapid searching across multiple sites.
"Searching across multiple sites is particularly appealing as it allows users to access information from different repositories with a single click," adds Cole. "Verity Ultraseek brings the content together easily and accurately without having to navigate across many sites."
"The Johns Hopkins Institutions` Web presence represents a fantastic educational and health information resource," says Garth Wittles, Verity district manager for South Africa. "The institutions` system-wide use of Verity Ultraseek allows researchers, educators, students and the general public to make the most of significant intellectual capital assets."
The content repositories at Johns Hopkins consist of hundreds of document formats spread across Web servers, file systems, secure systems and other repositories. Verity Ultraseek`s intelligent, adaptive spider indexes all of these into a common Ultraseek index that makes them searchable with a single query, permitting manuals, journals, abstracts or research papers to be stored in the format in which they were created. Users and administrators have found this feature to be useful in enhancing their search experience.
The use of Verity Ultraseek institution-wide has proven to be one of the most successful aspects of Johns Hopkins` drive to optimise IT resources.
Verity is the unquestioned world leader in its market spaces. Among its clients are nine of the top 10 financial institutions in the Fortune 1000; nine of the top 10 commercial and savings banks in the Global 500; all of the securities firms in the Global 500; four of the top five pharmaceutical companies in the Fortune 1000, and the top five pharmaceutical companies in the Global 500; and 40 of the top 50 companies in the Fortune 1000.
Verity leads the world in all three categories in which it competes: basic search (37,4%); advanced search (27,4%); and taxonomy and classification (24,9%).
* For a free trial of Verity Ultraseek, go to http://downloadcenter.verity.com/
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