Resources - Site review - Factiva ups ante in news aggregation. A search tool to help end-users access content within the Factiva news aggregation service has gone into beta-testing to perfect the final version. Mark Chillingworth predicts a hit for a site bristling with powerful but easy-to-use data mining technologies.

Not that long ago a search engine merely had to throw a list of results at a user to justify its existence. Today, there is just too much information online, whether on the internet or within a subscriber-accessed news database like Factiva. As a result, the modern search engine must produce not only results but a set of leads to further results. Factiva has rarely struggled to produce results, but with Search 2.0, the news aggregator has developed an extremely powerful search tool.

Currently, Search 2.0 is in beta format, the popular method of putting a service out into the market and letting real-life users test it and see what's right and wrong with it. Internet-based services are increasingly developed using beta-testing, and Factiva recognises that this method of going to market gives it some room for manoeuvre.

Dennis Cahill, product VP at Factiva, says: "The length of the beta-testing period will depend on the feedback we get from users, but we expect to have completed testing by the end of quarter one."

Initial feedback in the first week has shown that 25% of users are not sure about the News Clusters of tag clouds, so that may need some further work.

Search 2.0 is aimed at users without significant training in search skills. "We have the best search engine for information professionals, so they will not be offered this new search engine," Cahill says, adding that they will still get some of the graphical functionality.

Search 2.0 is aimed squarely at the end-user in an organisation - people who, Cahill believes, do not have Boolean searching skills. The end-user market has boomed for Factiva, he adds.

The Search 2.0 engine is based on Factiva Discovery technology, which is a set of off-the-shelf tools including technology from Fast Search & Transfer and Factiva's own taxonomy. Cahill says Search 2.0 incorporates technology from a dozen suppliers. "This is a bunch of text-mining tools which we have applied to two very different scenarios: reputation management and search," he says.