The article starts off with a very nice history of the development of the OPAC, but the authors seem to go out of their way to use terms and phrases that - for lack of a better term - "bad mouth" online catalogs as they are presently (at least in 2006) constituted: "stagnant technology"; "rich metadata trapped in the MARC record"; "closed, rigid and intricate online catalogs"; "the severity of the catalog problem"; "libraries are no better off."
Obviously, it should be the priority for the designers of these OPACs to update and adopt the technology in order to better reflect current trends in the world of searching, but there's no need to verbally tear down what came before just for the sake of making a point; after all, no system can achieve 100 percent search relevancy (they all have their own little "quirks" that keep them from reaching perfection).
Anyway, the article goes on to describe the implementation of Endeca's Information Access Platform at North Carolina State University; curious, I decided to see what kind of changes have occurred with NCSU's online catalog in the five years since this article was published.
Visiting the college's library homepage, I found that they are in fact still using the Endeca platform to power their online catalog (as helpfully pointed out by the "Guided Navigation by Endeca" byline at the bottom of the search results page) ... All of the bells and whistles touted in the article seem to be intact; for example, spell correction is present, as a search for "librerian" brings up "Also searched for: librarian". Also, subject headings and call number location are available in the left-hand column (180 results for "library science" appear under "subject", and 1046 results for "Z - Bibliography, Library Science" appears under "call number location").
The "Browse" tab mentioned in the article has been separated into two separate tabs: "Browse New Titles" (one can search for material newly added to their collection within the last week, the last month, or the last three months) and "Browse by Call Number" (which still includes a handy list of what all the groupings of Library of Congress call numbers stand for). Also, as the article suggests, users can still "submit a blank search and browse the entire collection by any of the dimensions" (taking this action produces a list of 2122255 results).
In addition, the article mentioned that there were "plans to pull out other dimensions, such as format, language, or library, for browsing" ... It looks like Endeca was able to live up to that promise, as clicking on the "Advanced Search" tab now provides these options (for example, selecting "Chinese" under "Language" in the "Optional limits" section produces a list of 2793 results, while selecting "Fiction" under "Genre" in the left-hand column cuts that number down to 127 results, just as the article predicted).
It appears that the old Web2 search system has been eliminated entirely (or else it has been "buried" to the point where I cannot easily find it), so I couldn't try the search results test that the authors used with the broad term "marsupial" ... However, I can report that the library's holdings in this area has jumped from 78 to 171 items, but the top five hits no longer have "marsupial" in the title and "marsupials" or "marsupialia" as a subject heading; of course, this is a minor gripe, as the top three results are e-books which do not include the traditional LC subject headings (anyway, there are no bogus "Tributes to Malcolm C. McKenna"-type results in the first several pages, so I think this search can still be considered extremely relevant).
One more thing: I wanted to take a look at the "More titles like this" feature that the authors spoke about in the article ... So, I clicked on one of the results ("A fragile balance : the extraordinary story of Australian marsupials") and noticed a "Browse Shelf" link under "More Like This"; I clicked that link, which displayed a "virtual book shelf" of titles found around that particular book by call number:
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