The Software Abstractions Blog

Yahoo! SearchMonkey - Released to Developers

The good folks from Yahoo! unveiled their new open search platform Yahoo! SearchMonkey, at a developer launch party today at their Sunnyvale headquarters. In some ways, the SearchMonkey platform is revolutionary and a major step forward in search, allowing publishers to participate directly in improving the quality of their own information presented on the Yahoo! search results page (this is also implicitly a push for the bottom-up approach to the Semantic Web, which most industry observers have given up on in favor of a top-down approach). The platform also lets publishers and third-party developers build applications aimed at improving the search experience. Finally, and most important, if enough publishers and app developers participate in the program, it promises to improve the quality of search results for end users.

Features

At the simplest level, you can think of SearchMonkey as a community-powered set of rich information boxes (similar to the Google OneBox) that appear on the Yahoo! search results page. Publishers can provide this rich data to the Yahoo! search index in a variety of ways: through structured data feeds (RSS), through RDF or Microformat markup on web pages, or through simple page extraction. The "Information Bar" shows up underneath the main search results. The Yahoo! search team has also provided tools to enable developers to build search-based applications very simply and easily.

Powerset Launches Wikipedia Search

Semantic search engine Powerset, which we've written about here before, has just launched its initial release. The current release is limited to indexing Wikipedia content, but it provides a great showcase for their technology and user experience.

For example, my search for "Alexander the Great" provided the following results page:

Cognition Technologies recognized by KMWorld as one of "100 that matter"

Cognition Technologies, which focuses on Semantic natural language processing technology, was named by KMWorld as one of the top 100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management for 2008.

Says Cognition CEO Scott Jarus:

One of the biggest barriers to building a natural language understanding system is to build the semantic map and the dictionary with details of the syntactic behavior of words (i.e. how words behave within context).  Cognition's team has spent more than 20 years building this capability into Cognition’s Semantic NLP for the English language ...  and our technology is commercially available today!

Semantic search and NLP technologies seem to have arrived - they are generating a lot of buzz lately. In addition to mainstays Hakia and Powerset, there is a spate of new entries, including Cognition, BooRah and eeggi. We will be reviewing some of these new alternate search engines on this blog in the near future.

Congratulations, Scott and the Cognition team!

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Thoughts about Alternative Search Engines Day 2008

I was at the Alternative Search Engines Day event in San Francisco last week. Organized by Charles Knight of the Alt Search Engines blog (and friends), it brought together key people from over 40 alternative search engines. It was an amazing crowd, full of interesting and bright people, and the overall energy was incredible!

At the keynote, Charles gave a pitch for bringing ASEs together that was very well received. He showed us some examples of what a unified User Interface that combined multiple search engines would look like. I contributed a tiny bit (expanding on the idea that complementary ASEs could band together to provide Federated Searches for enhanced traffic and usability, and listing a few ways for the Alts to cooperate even while competing ).

Cooperation of Alternate Search Engines: A Manifesto

( This post is inspired by my discussions with my friend, Charles Knight of AltSearchEngines )

Background

I'll be at the Alternative Search Engines Day tomorrow, a unique event in San Francisco put together by Charles and the AltSearchEngines team. The event is sponsored by SeeqPod, UpTake, Matchpoint, HealthPricer, GoPubMed and Blogdimension. (Unfortunately, it's not open to the general public.) If you're part of an Alternative Search Engine, I hope to see you there!

As I was getting ready for the event, it got me thinking about ASEs and how they can work together.

The Case for the Alts

I love the ASEs - Alts rock! Without them, there would be little innovation in Search, no new frontiers to be explored.

The Alts are the ones that keep pushing the envelope with new directions in search technology, whether it's algorithms, user interface, social search or something else.  Although Google has some fine technology and is synonymous with search, I firmly believe that we're still at Search 1.0, and have a long way to go. Because of all this competition from the Alts, and the resulting innovation, web search continues to improve.

Web 2.0: The Real Opportunity Lies Ahead of Us

JP Rangaswami wrote an amazing post on his blog a little while ago: Interesting, but of no commercial value , in which he cites a series of examples of new technologies - like email and spreadsheets - that were initially considered simply interesting, rather than useful; now we cannot imagine living or working without those very same technologies. It seems likely that this will happen with today's emerging technologies, like RSS feeds, popular voting, social networking, micro-blogging, crowdsourcing and so on.

History Repeats Itself

We have already seen this happen with Web 1.0. A series of tiny, well-capitalized startups (remember Webvan? ) gained early traction online in a variety of market segments, from books to furniture to pet food to groceries. The large, established brick-and-mortar players were slow to respond.

Enterprise 2.0: The Engineering of Marketing Online

When I was talking with my friend Shreesha Ramdas (from OuterJoin ) last week, he shared a perspective that really resonated with me. In a nutshell, he believes that the Marketing of online products and sites is rapidly becoming an Engineering function, both in terms of operational activities and measurement.

The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that he's on to something. Marketing of online products and sites is inherently different from classical marketing. Unlike regular marketing channels, online campaigns allow marketers to proceed systematically step-by-step along a predetermined course. The results of each distinct campaign can be measured precisely, even when multiple campaigns are going on simultaneously. Most important, the market can be broken up into thousands of micro-segments, with targeted campaigns aimed at each one.

Introducing: Gmail Custom Time!

In the grand tradition of Project Teaspoon, Google unveiled yet another profound and significant product today: Gmail Custom Time .  This exciting new product is sure to be a life-saver for many a forgetful techie.

To quote Google's own marketing content:

Ever wish you could go back in time and send that crucial email that could have changed everything -- if only it hadn't slipped your mind? Gmail can now help you with those missed deadlines, missed birthdays and missed opportunities.

If you want to see what it looks like, here's the image:

Remember: you heard it here first! :-)

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Could You Survive For A Day - Without Google?

Can you spend a whole day without using Google? - that's the challenge issued by my friend Charles Knight over on the Alt Search Engines blog (see also ReadWriteWeb's coverage). To help you out, he's going to publish the latest version of his popular Top 100 Alternative Search Engines list tomorrow.

I think this is a great idea! We have all become addicted to the power (and limitations) of Google search - just like television before the age of the Internet, we cannot imagine life without it. And yet, as Charles' list shows, there are plenty of alternative search engines out there, innovating Search in a variety of different ways.

Personally, I'm going to use this opportunity to learn the latest features of Quintura, an innovative search engine we've covered before on this blog (here and here ). Quintura has jumped on board this idea by creating a special destination page for discovering the best hoaxes, pranks, jokes and tricks for April fool's day. [Rest assured, this is no joke!]

So how about you - can you do it? Why not give it a shot and try out an alternative search engine? Or two, or five, or all hundred on Charles' list? Can you last a day, an hour, even five minutes? Try it and the results may surprise you!

Tim O'Reilly and Sir Tim Berners-Lee concur: Semantic Web Likely to be Top-Down

In a previous post, I asked the question: Where are the Meaning-Enabled Authoring Tools?, arguing that publishers who regularly post similar content (especially content that conforms to common formats) would get a big advantage from using Semantic Authoring tools for creating new content. By using semantic tools, not only can you get SEO benefits and improve findability , the content can more easily be re-purposed for other uses such as web applications and services.

This is essentially a bottom-up approach to the semantic web: adding semantic notation to the content itself. However, as the post went on to say, the prevailing view is definitely a top-down one, viz. that semantic meaning will have to be extracted by applications from perfectly ordinary web pages, and that the adding of semantic knowledge to the content itself is unlikely (aside from very limited contexts, such as Microformats).

Two recent podcasts with two of the leading voices in this space further confirm this view.