Funnelback has announced version 9 of its search engine software, six months after its acquisition by MySourceMatrix CMS developer Squiz Australia.

Brett Matson, Managing Director of Funnelback, the Australian offshoot of the CSIRO, said the company is keen to address the growing market for federated search at enterprise sites incorporating SharePoint repositories.

Available as a hosted or software solution, Funnelback is finding traction with portals or corporate or government Web sites looking to an external search platform. This now represents over 80% of its customer base.

"The exciting new feature in this release is the Funnelback Pattern Analyser," said Matson, "which is an innovative technology developed by our team here in Canberra. Our customers will be using this technology to receive close to real-time notifications when a spike in search traffic occurs on a particular topic.

"The pattern analyser automatically determines related queries, such as 'H1N1' and 'swine flu' and treats them as part of the same query spike. Each notification includes information about the predominate geographies that searchers are originating from and also associates the query spikes to current news stories to provide context for the spike in traffic on that topic.

"The business need for query spike detection is based around the need by organisations in all sectors to use timely query analytics to drive strategic business change when it's needed, rather than react to it at a later stage."

The Reports Dashboard, accessible via Funnelback’s Administration interface, offers a selection of new reports to monitor trends in queries, user behaviour and search results. Reports available include popular queries, top searches by location, query trends over time and click behaviour. These reports can be easily exported into various formats and subscriptions can be set up to automatically email reports to administrators.

Battling against search giants Google and Microsoft (FAST) is no problem for the Aussie company, with a staff of around 20 in Canberra, that has seen its SaaS model embraced by the Australian Federal Government. Funnelback is the search engine behind the Australian's government's portal Web site australia.gov.au.

Improvements to the end-user interface include:
Faster Contextual Navigation – Contextual Navigation presents a navigational list relative to the context of the search query, allowing users to drill down into more refined content. Funnelback 9 has dramatically increased the speed of this process, resulting in a fast response time for the generation of contextual navigation.
Improved Spelling Suggestions – The system can make suggestions even if all words are correctly spelled, can make suggestions in multi-lingual environments, will not make suggestions which do not have any search results and learns and improves according to user behaviour.
Near-Duplicate Detection – Pushes highly similar results down in the rankings.