Clearwell Systems announced the availability of Transparent Search with Clearwell E-Discovery Platform 4.0 in the wake of Victor Stanley, O’Keefe, and Equity Analytics. The primary object of Transparent Search is to show how advanced searches like wildcard and proximity searches match documents in terms of the actual terms being matched. This is done by exhaustively listing all the terms that match the advanced search query with hit counts for each one. Users can then selectively filter the results based on the identified terms based on sampling results to adjust the inclusiveness of the search. Multiple searches can be performed at once to save time and tags can be quickly to the filtered search results.

Clearwell has posted an informative Flash demo which can be reached from their homepage which is worth watching. PlanetEIM has taken some screenshots and put together short overview.

In discussing this new feature, Kamal Shah, Clearwell vice president of marketing, gave an interesting quote to Dave Raffo of SearchStorage.com indicating web search needs to scale but the same requirement may not be necessary for enterprise search or e-discovery. He says,

Saying one approach can be applied by all is like saying the same person can win the 100 meters and marathon in the Olympics. They have different objectives and business drivers. For enterprise search, it’s speed and simplicity. For the Web, it’s speed, simplicity and scalability. For e-discovery, it’s defensibility – can you defend best practices and show it in court and minimize nonrelevant results because of cost per results?

With enterprises facing many terabytes of ESI and billions of records, scalability requirements for enterprise search and e-discovery are becoming increasingly important. For e-discovery, this requirement is primarily upstream from Clearwell where other solutions will be used to perform an initial cull to make the number of records more manageable.

Overall, the features bundled with Transparent Search look very compelling and are just part of the many capabilities Clearwell offers. Organizations facing high stakes E-Discovery should consider the Clearwell E-Discovery Platform for their needs.

Website: clearwellsystems.com

Pricing: E-Discovery Platform is $65,000 per 100 GB plus maintenance and support

Management: Aaref A. Hilaly, President & CEO

Funding: $29+M (C: $17M, August, 2007; B: $12M, April, 2006; A, January, 2006?)

Investors: DAG Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital