A new model of a Trusted Web and Decentralized Search

Ask most users and they will tell you in no uncertain terms that enterprise search sucks. Why is it generally so frustrating? Why does it fail to meet most user needs? Why can’t it find the information you are looking for?

Because it is a general search tool when what you are often looking for is something highly specialized. The result of a general tool and a specialized need is an extremely frustrating user experience. Finding the right information is exactly like a finding a needle in a haystack. You need to get lucky.

But good search should not be about getting lucky. Although we could all use a little luck. It should be about delivering on your unique needs. When you have a specialized need you reach for a specialized tool. One that is perfectly adapted to the job at hand. That is exactly what a personalized search engine delivers.

A Personalized Search Revolution

Jumper is a revolution in Enterprise Search precisely because it is a personalized, specialized, and trusted engine. It contains an index of searchable information that has been provided by trusted colleagues, who share a common interest, and are working toward a common goal.

At Jumper we believe that each person’s ability to drive trust into every search is the animating force that moves us from centralized search paradigms to a new, decentralized one. In this new model, we will be able to search better because trusted communities are doing search for you. They collectively share this highly specialized information and knowledge to build a better personalized search engine.

We can better trust search results because people we know had good experiences with specific information resources and then share that experience with others. We get better search results because the community of users that built the search index is like us; they share our interests, our passions, and speak our language.

Personalized search is discipline specific, much like vertical web search engines, it is focused on your specific industry or research. However, it delivers universal search across all information sources allowing you to learn about new things and ideas based on personal recommendations from a community of people who are similar to you.

The New Model of Trusted Search

Traditional monolithic enterprise search is limited by its very generality, its one-size-fits-all indexing approach, its rigid global taxonomies, its ambiguous metadata. The biggest problem is changing semantics and antiquated metadata. The differences between one word or acronym, and the other, can vary widely by user, profession, location, or industry. The word web, for instance, can have entirely different meanings in different contexts. Even if, across all different forms, locations and languages, you are looking for the word web, what is the context you want to place it in? By personalizing search the context is always relevant and decided by the community of users.

This new proactive model of creating trust is not some future, far off concept. It is happening right now with Jumper 2.0. It delivers personalized, specialized, and trusted search precisely because it is easily deployed to smaller groups of users. It is light-weight, portable, web-based, and license-free. It is easily customized and adaptable to meet the unique needs of departments and divisions, research groups and project teams. It is a point solution search approach that is highly flexible and very dynamic.

Jumper leverages social knowledge tagging that makes it easy and intuitive for users to apply tags, descriptions, definitions, classifications, almost anything you want to apply to make information easier to find and more usable. This reputation system is based on user input and expertise that allows us to better trust verified content, media, or data and to rely on the knowledge attached to that information resource. We use trust based rating systems to determine what information is considered the best and what is not worth your time.

The explosive growth of Jumper community search demonstrates how people are frustrated with traditional enterprise search. All they really want is an effective search tool. One that works for them. They are proactively creating trusted search through shared interests.

Happy Birthday Jumper 2.0

Today marks the one year anniversary of Jumper’s first production release. We are celebrating the open source release of Jumper 2.0 on Sourceforge (March 29th) and look forward to another exciting year.

We have achieved unexpected growth in this short span and the credit goes to all of our dedicated community members. Lots of smart people, from smart companies, are driving Jumper 2.0 forward. Since our initial launch one year ago we have over 5000 enterprise downloads. Our software is installed in some of the largest Life Sciences and Pharmaceutical organizations, Automobile and Construction equipment manufacturers, Food Product and Beverage companies, leading Universities around the globe, and several US Government agencies. Our open source software has been downloaded in over 76 countries with more downloads to China than any other country. We get more hits, downloads, and requests from China than any other country outside the US.

Jumper 2.0 is just beginning to gain recognition as a game changing software platform. Jumper has grown rapidly from department and project level deployments by rogue groups of employees frustrated with existing corporate IT solutions, to development level beta and sandbox platforms that opened peoples eyes to the power of social knowledge tagging, to full blown enterprise platforms that supplement existing Search and KM tools. Jumper wikis are popping up to provide users with support and advice and corporate IT, instead of trying to police or squash this self-help behavior, has begun to embrace it.

We look forward to becoming a significant driver of innovation in the enterprise, empowering users everywhere behind the firewall, and planning new developments to the Jumper platform in the coming year. Our community of users, supporters, and developers grows stronger every day and we anticipate the suggestions and contributions of each new member. It is your feedback that will result in new features and tools that benefit the broader community.

From all of us at Jumper thank you to the community of users who support us. Your comments, suggestions, complaints, bug fixes, and continued deployments help make for better software.