Xerox's FactSpotter isn't a mainstream search tool that will debut as a challenge to present day search engines. But the features packed into it may well pave the way for an ideal search tool that is built on the concept of connecting data rather than collecting data. Collecting data is what mainstream engines do today - look for links ranked via statistical or mathematical models and push them to users. The folks at Xerox intend to...
Relevancy of results has been the dominant theme in my semantic search posts so far. And in this piece I will be discussing about SenseBot, a search tool that has the added feature of summarizing results. Very often, the intent of a user is to obtain brief information on a concept or a keyword. In such scenarios it is more relevant to the user if the results describe the phenomenon or event more...
Semantics based search is the flavor of my articles and in this one I'll be focusing on the Textonomy suite of products from Crystal Semantics, now acquired by the e-advertising firm ad pepper media. The company was co-founded by Professor David Crystal, a world authority in linguistics. The textonomy product has at its heart a "sense-engine" , a product of more than 8 years of linguistic research that evaluates the semantics and stylistics...
Exalead, the search engine founded by Francois Bourdoncle (earlier involved with AltaVista) has a number of features that makes it a bit of everything. It has vertical search option (including blog, video, image search), products tailored for enterprises and the search engine sports nifty features such as – Truncation, Thumbnails of pages and more. But semantics is my theme and this article focuses on Exalead's image search. Unwrapping the Exalead Image Search By leveraging the...
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia once said, "Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken." And while he's dabbling with the concept of an open-source search engine, Dr. Riza C Berkan of Hakia.com believes the fix is in the semantics. The CEO and founder of the "meanings" based search engine believes that the future of search lies in understanding what the user wants rather than...
What do Stanford grads Anand and Venky have in common with Google founders, Larry and Sergie? One, they were batch mates. And two, they are into the prolific and perhaps most competitive of web domains, Search. Kosmix.com, the topical search engine, founded by the Indian duo attempts to resolve the Gordian knot of "meaning" in a search query. And the technology that they believe will do the work is "Categorization" of results into verticals...
Relevancy is the key to contextual advertising, and online contextual advertising is big business. That's a no-brainer, as all web and software heavyweights are vying to make the most of contextual advertising. How is relevancy measured? And how is that used to shoot the most relevant of ads based on what you do online? Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have been at the forefront of implementing technologies for targeted ads. Here's a count down on what...
Loren Baker
Ann Smarty
Alan Bleiweiss
David Harry
