Whatever Company is about to launch an Enterprise 2.0 search tool called knowledgeplaza.net. Right now they are showing a teaser site with some interesting content until they launch. What is different about the search engine is that it will index all employee information within a company and use that to deliver everybody within that company useful search results. The goal is to captivate the companies hidden information and knowledge and making it accessible.
There have been many more or less successful attempts to do similar things in the past including solutions from Google and Microsoft that promise similar results. It wasn’t exactly clear to me (by just reading the information on the teaser site) how this will be different from current offerings but this is what they explained to me via email:
“Imagine a large bank customer using Knowledge Plaza; (internal) experts bookmark websites of relevance, tag them according to sector, etc. (so far, it bears some resemblance to del.icio.us or Cogenz.com in the enterprise space) Knowledge Plaza allows to instantaneously build a custom *search engine* on those very sites, a perfect exemple of “less is more”: information is more relevant than a similar Google search, because your search is run through only a few hundred of pages, out of a few dozen sites hand-picked by your (expert) colleagues, not through billions of pages, with a global PageRank.
Knowledge Plaza really puts the ‘social’ into “enterprise search”, and it’s something that may allow it to jump past larger players in the enterprise search field.”
The company was founded by Olivier Verbeke and has raised close to a million euros in funding so far. The enterprisesocialsearch.com site is meant as a ‘teasing’ campaign only with the actual service launching soon on knowledgeplaza.net.
The slideshow explaining this new service is currently very popular on SlideShare (‘Slideshow of the Day’) which is understandable because it is fun to watch:
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.