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Panoptic™: a better search engine

CSIRO created and commercialised an enterprise search engine that is accurate, fast and can dramatically increase a user’s productivity.

  • 15 July 2011 | Updated 14 October 2011

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:

  • Australian Securities Exchange (ASX)
  • Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)
  • NineMSN
  • Westpac Banking Corporation
  • Oxfam
  • 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:

  • web search evaluation
  • test collection development
  • efficient and effective retrieval
  • distributed information retrieval (metasearch).

Awards

The Panoptic™ search engine has been widely recognised as a leader in its field.

It has won the:

  • Network Computing Editor's Choice Award, 2003
  • Network Computing Well Connected Award, 2004
  • AIIA iAward, 2004.

Commercialisation

On 22 December 2005 Funnelback Pty Ltd was formed to accelerate commercialisation of the Panoptic™ technology.

Funnelback™ has also been adopted as the name of the enterprise search product formerly known as Panoptic™.

In July 2009 Funnelback Pty Ltd was acquired by content management company, Squiz.

Read more about Text analysis tools to find what you’re looking for.

  • Panoptic™ is a trademark of CSIRO Australia.
  • Funnelback™ is a trademark of Funnelback Pty Ltd.