Forward Search

Fully Customisable Relevance Ranking

Change weight of content elements, based on any attribute (Meta Data) or combination of attributes (e.g. category, title, source etc.) by various ranking criteria’s. Ranking can increase the value of search results to suit business and user requirements.

Intuitive administrative client for configuration and management

Forward Search is managed via a highly usable, browser-based administration interface (standalone) or embedded in the CMS (EPiServer/Sitecore). The interface allows the editors, administrators and developers to setup configure, tune, access to Search Behaviour information and reporting etc. The administration client supports different roles or inherits roles from the CMS and roles, client languages etc. can all be customised to fit different needs.

Fully Flexible Search Presentation

All Forward Search presentation is completely customisable and is delivered with samples that show how to use features such as Did you Mean?, Type Ahead NEW, Faceted Search & Navigation, Geo Search etc. to improve the search experience.

Speed and Scalability

Forward Search scales to millions of documents and terabytes of data, in one or several real-time updated indexes, with insignificant response time.

Product based Solution and Development Platform

Forward Search is a product based solution, giving fast or possible complex and flexible implementation for search applications such as Unified Search (multiple sources), Secure Search (ensuring rights of content, user or group ), Contextual Search (Combined search in unstructured/structured content), Multimedia Search, Geo Search, Document Search (documents incl. Meta Data inheritance) and OCR Search NEW (scanned documents).

Fully Flexible Platform

Forward Search gives developers the ability to apply Search to any type of sources with numerous ways to customise and interfere with the platform in order to meet different search needs. The platform gives the possibility of making custom connectors, push content directly to the index, designing individual index structures (Dynamic Custom Fields NEW), applying custom filters, enriching collected content before (Custom Finalizers) or after indexing (DocMod NEW) and merging of indexes and the safe distribution of indexes (Indexserver Postprocessor NEW).

Faceted Search and Navigation (Search Driven Navigation)

Navigation based on any facets (Meta Data) describing the content applying faster navigation and improving the search experience. Faceted Counted Search - Count of each found result-value within every facet NEW.

Combined Full-Text and Meta Data Search

Allows search in unstructured data with advanced ranking algorithm returning high quality results.

Scalability and speed

Search many millions of webpages, content elements and documents with fast query response time.

Enterprise Search

Forward Search provides a single access (one search box) to all your information enterprise-wide, while still enforcing the security policy of each unique source. Sources can be one or several indexes in any combination required.

Integration

Forward Search is closely integrated with EPiServer, Sitecore and Umbraco.

Forward Search integrates easily with third-party portal and content management solutions.

Event based indexing

Forward Search supports both Event and Schedule-based indexing in real time, any new, deleted or updated documents.

Geo Search

Forward Search delivers Location based search – Search or Sort on distance.

Multimedia search

Search in Meta Data embedded in media files (graphic, video and audio).

OCR Search NEW

Forward Search OCR (Optical Character Recognition) module makes it possible to search in scanned documents e.g. JPG, Gif, BMP or PDF formats that only contain graphics, not text. The OCR module converts the image documents into text that is injected into the Forward Search index, ready for searching. OCR module supports 34 languages.

Keyword Search

Search for any word across all content (incl. Meta Data).

Did you Mean?

Provides alternatives word suggestions based on Fuzzy Logic and the actual words in the content (Index Wordlist).

Custom Thesaurus

Maintain synonyms, concepts or alternative search words, to insure the most relevant search results by expanding query’s to match up organisation’s terminology.

Multilingual Thesaurus

Use Synonym dictionaries in 25 different languages to insure more relevant search results.

Featured Content

Promote special content to get presented before content ranked higher.

Ranking

Content are ranked by their relevance score.

Customisable ranking

Boost the rankings of important content based on any attribute (Meta Data) or combination of attributes or ranking based on user voting on the value of an individual search result (page/document) etc.

Sorting of search results

Results can be sorted by relevance, date or combination relevance and distance in both ascending and descending order. Custom sorting is also possible.

Type Ahead NEW

Type Ahead or Query as you type - expands text during typing of a query based on the word list from index.

Popular Search Words NEW

Queries are harvest and can be used for statistics or for rendering an Tag Cloud etc.

Contextual Search

Combined search in both unstructured (web, documents etc.) and structured content (ERP), from multiple sources.

Intuitive administrative client for configuration and management

Setup and configure any source.

Crawler and Index configuration

Index, Source and Crawler scheduling configuration and management that’s include cloning of Indexes and triggering of indexes with support for multiple sources and indexes (several sources in one index or one index per source).

Scheduled updates of indexes

Schedule indexing on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.

Exclusions

Configure exclusion patterns for any source.

Inclusions NEW

Configure include patterns for any source.

Dynamic Custom Fields NEW

Setup, configure and map custom fields for any source or index.

Custom Fields

Setup, configure and map custom fields for source or index.

Maintain Custom Thesaurus

Add, edit or delete synonyms, concepts etc.

Index information

View and query the content in the available indexes.

Geo Search Management

Setup, configure and query Geo Search information’s (coordinates, grids, resolutions etc.).

Search Behaviour and reporting

View Crawler Logs, Index Statistics, Query History, Popular Search Words NEW and Website Performance Monitoring log NEW

Solution overview

View solution (software components and versions) and licensing information.

News Feed NEW

An Atom Feed News reader relaying Forward Search news (new updates etc.)

Role Management

The Administration client supports different roles (Developer, Administrator, Editor etc.), which can be customised completely freely or can be inherited from roles used by the CMS (EPiServer/Sitecore).

Customising the Administration client

All part of the interface can be customised including roles, languages and features etc. to fit any needs.

Result Presentation (Samples)

Forward Search is delivered with samples (.Net controls and XSLT) which are used as a starting point to customise search renderings (presentations) to suit individual needs.

Results as XML or Datasets

Search results are returned in XML or as Datasets together with result information (number of hits, time spent on search and error messages). It is possible determine the exact information delivered in the result - ask for the specific fields in the index (e.g. tittle, url, text etc.) and the size on summary returned. NEW - WebService returning search interface (Json).

Highlighting

Provides a result with search word (term) highlighting.

Thumbnails

Generate thumbnails of crawled webpages and documents during the indexing process. Thumbnails can be used to improve the search experience.

Accessibility

Forward Search supports renderings that complies with the W3C web accessibility guidelines.

Fielded Search

Content and Meta Data are extracted during indexing and populated by either document properties or Meta Tags to field in the index. Meta Tags/Meta Data is complaint with the Dublin Core standard. It is possible to search for content in any combination of fields including additional custom fields.

Boolean Search

Boolean operators (AND/OR/NOT) provide the user with a simple means to combine words, phrases and sub queries with Boolean operators, to either widen or narrow a result set.

Phrase Search

Use the phrase operator which requires component words to appear consecutively and in the order specified.

Date Query

Allows user to constrain the results to documents which were last modified within a given date range.

Range Search NEW

Faster Numerical Range Query - Returns hits within a specified range (as numeric or as string with zero-padding).

Wildcard Search

Forward Search supports single and multiple character wildcard searches within single term (‘?’ or ‘*’) to provide results containing variations of the search word. Both left (NEW) and right truncation is supported.

Proximity Search

Proximity search shows results where query words appear near each other.

Fuzzy Search

Fuzzy search use the tilde, "~", symbol at the end of a single word to find alternative word that sounds similar.

Boosted Search

Forward Search provides the relevance level of matching documents based on the terms found. To boost a term use the caret, "^", symbol with a boost factor (a number) at the end of the term search for. The higher the boost factor, the more relevant the term will be.

Intranet & internet

Web crawler supports (HTTP, HTTPS).

Other sources

Crawler and Content connectors available for various applications including Files, Microsoft SharePoint (2003&MOSS2007) and custom applications. Connect to relational databases (SQL server etc.) through XML or web-enabled pages. Support for additional document sources can be developed as required.

Multiple file types supported

Indexes HTML, XML, Text, PDF, RTF, MS-Office (incl. Office2007/2010) and Open Office 2.0+ files. Optional file format using 3. Part filters or custom plug-ins (Open Structure).

Multiple languages supported

Unicode support plus automatic language detection for several languages.

Document Push feature

Push content (documents) to the processing pipeline – Adding, modifying and deleting content in index without using Web Crawler, File Crawler or connectors.

Indexservice Postprocessor NEW

For complex and distributed Forward Search setups, the postprocessor enables merging of indexes and the safe distribution of indexes and index-deltas between installations.

Index Document Modification system (DocMod) NEW

The DocMod system allows slow asynchronous updates and enrichment of the index documents following an indexing, it being a full or incremental index update or an event based index update. DocMod is a series of connected modules that are invoked from the Indexservice Postprocessor upon completion of an indexing task.

Partial Crawl NEW

Crawler supports partial crawl on a source e.g. only the first 1000 urls.

HTML 5 Support NEW

New filtering options for Dynamic Custom Fields – added HTML 5 tags.

Content, users and group security

Application or infrastructure security retained. Enforces content, users and group’s access controls.

Windows file access

Integration of Windows file access permissions, including NTFS/NLTM/Active Directory file-level, SharePoint container level, for uncompromised security.

Restricted information sources

Restricted information sources to specific users and groups based on Windows domains and Active Directories credentials.

HTTPS

Secure sites can be crawled by providing user credentials required by the web servers.

Accessibility

Possible to access all content via a single search interface.

Speed / Highly efficient

Fast indexing and query processing.

Customisable

Every part of the Forward Search platform can be expanded and customised.

Integration

Flexible platform that ensures integration all types of solutions and products.

Proven technology

Since the introduction in 2006, Forward Search has gained a large number of TOP 100 company’s, organisations and government institutions across the Nordic, Benelux and UK.

Tailored to your needs

Forward Search resolves complex search problems which are not solved by a one size fits all system, no matter how large or small your organisation.

Quality service and support

A dedicated support team with access to research and development resources on site help our partners support the customer.