CSIRO created and commercialised an enterprise search engine that is accurate, fast and can dramatically increase a user’s productivity.
Poor search results can cost an organisation millions of dollars per year in lost customers and lost opportunities.
Panoptic™ is a high performance whole-of-enterprise search engine that was developed over eight years by CSIRO and the Australian National University (ANU).
It was designed to dramatically improve the effectiveness of information retrieval for an organisation’s customers and staff.
Advanced search technology
Internet search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing make it easy to find a business or organisation, but that’s only half the job.
Once users have found an organisation’s site, enterprise search allows them to locate goods, services and relevant information from multiple sources within that organisation.
The Panoptic™ search engine was designed to offer a unique combination of metadata and full text indexing. It can quickly search through a collection of millions of documents in a variety of formats.
Outcomes
“Panoptic™ sparkles with superior indexing, speed and an easy interface”
Network Computing Magazine
Panoptic™ significantly outperforms its competitors. Benchmarking studies show it’s up to twice as effective as most installed search engines.
Panoptic™ technology was taken up by many organisations including:
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Australian Securities Exchange (ASX)
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Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)
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NineMSN
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Westpac Banking Corporation
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Oxfam
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National Research Council of Canada.
It has also been installed on australia.gov.au, allowing Australians to easily find Government online information and services.
Underlying capabilities
CSIRO has an international reputation in information retrieval research.
The skills we drew on to create Panoptic™ include:
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web search evaluation
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test collection development
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efficient and effective retrieval
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distributed information retrieval (metasearch).
Awards
The Panoptic™ search engine has been widely recognised as a leader in its field.
It has won the:
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Network Computing Editor’s Choice Award, 2003
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Network Computing Well Connected Award, 2004
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AIIA iAward, 2004.
Commercialisation
On 22 December 2005 Funnelback Pty Ltd was formed to accelerate the commercialisation of the Panoptic™ technology.
Funnelback™ has also been adopted as the name of the enterprise search product formerly known as Panoptic™.
Ongoing research
CSIRO's experts in information engineering continue to build on this technology.
We are researching technologies, tools and interfaces that improve the retrieval of information, making it easier for people to find what they need.
Specifically we are developing technologies for:
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efficiently finding relevant information wherever it is
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delivering relevant information effectively
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browsing through large information spaces, including email
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data integration and semantic searching across many different information repositories and services.
Read more about our work in Information engineering.
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