Print
Discuss
Send to friend
RSS feedsThis year, I felt some trepidation as I entered the Online Information show because I was wondering what the dot-commotion might have done to exhibitors.
I soon found the show's usual champions - Thomson, Reed Elsevier and Factiva - parading and panting for attendees in their apartment-sized portabooths. But I was still worried about the little guys. Would they have had the money to buy space?
This year's technology buzz was metasearch. Verity, Plumtree and others showcased enterprise products that take a single query and return results from various sources.
A good example of basic metasearch is the public site operated by Scott Banister. A query can be passed serially to Yahoo, Alta Vista and Lycos. But the user must review three lists of hits.
Ixquick, which operates from lower Manhattan, bumps metasearch up a notch in usefulness. A single query is automatically passed against Alta Vista, Kanoodle, Overture, WiseNut and the Open Directory.
The user can tick which search engines to include. The results are merged into a single list and ranked by relevance using Ixquick's algorithms. These combine popularity and other metrics derived, in part, from the type of maths used for calculating the financial return on index funds.
Similar functionality is on offer at the oddly named InfoSpace property Dogpile.
However, search technology needs to face up to the task of passing a query against branded, for-fee content, specific websites, and internal repositories in Lotus Notes databases.
And Cogenta, a small exhibitor of the kind I'd feared would be missing from the exhibition, had taken a two-by-three-metre stand by a fire exit to show how it could be done.
Cogenta is a six-person operation based in Farnham, Surrey - an area that reminds me of the Bear and Ragged Staff pub and the sluggish River Wey.
Yet, when I arrived, its stand was difficult to see because of the large clot of attendees peering at laptop monitors.
Cogenta's president, David Phillips, explained the company's technology. "With our software you can build a current web index of the sites you care about and use them as jumping off points to the rest of the relevant web," he said.
"Google and other search engines try to index the entire web, but most professionals care about a small number of sites. Some may be public and available without charge; others may require the user to pay and enter a username and password."
The crowd of about 20 people nodded in unison like a group of bobble-head plastic dogs.
"How many of you wade through all the hits returned by Google?" Phillips asked. No bobble-heads raised their paws.
"With Cogenta, you can use our prepackaged list of websites for specific business functions, add your own sites, or do both," he continued.
"You can include content from your own intranet as well. You decide when to search these sites. Go off and have a latte [much head-bobbing] and when you come back, you have a personal index of the web documents and sites you want, including pages from sites you never knew existed."
Search software as a desktop application
Cogenta, unlike most web indexing operations, but like Canadian search specialist Copernic, offers its software as a desktop application. Unlike Copernic, Cogenta handles intranet and for-fee content.
More importantly, the infrastructure of Plumtree and equivalent enterprise software is simply not needed with Cogenta's technology.
The idea for a personal indexing service came from Phillips's experiences in document imaging and knowledge management.
After the exhibits closed, he said: "The Cogenta idea is obvious, really: give professionals control over their time and their content.
"In my corporate work, I saw first-hand that a great many professionals were searching Yahoo and Alta Vista plus a few narrowly focused sites. What professionals needed was a way to index the sites of importance to them.
"Google and other search engines were there for broad searches. The enterprise systems weren't set up to meet the needs of one person with special research requirements. We fill the gap."
Unlike products from many mainstream providers, Cogenta is built using Microsoft's VisualStudio.Net tools. The spider, the parser, the search engine and the interface are .Net-compliant.
Phillips believes that the .Net approach will reduce the time needed to develop new features.
The company will release a web browser version of the product early in 2003.
Here's what the software does. It takes a query and generates a page of results. The user can also copy specific web pages to a computer. Cogenta provides drag-and-drop tools that plonk the document in a specific folder. It makes filing and sorting online content simple.
"No training is needed to use our software," said Phillips. "Anyone familiar with the Windows interface can generate a personal web index, file documents and retrieve them without worrying about network access or if the source document is still on a web server."
So why does the world need Cogenta? "It seems that we struck a chord with the individual professional who does not want to invest the time to become a search wizard, and who does not want to carry out research by looking at for-fee listings that appear at the top of a web search engine's result page," explained Phillips.
"He or she wants content from for-fee sites and their intranet, more than Yahoo and less than the 300,000 hits on Alta Vista."
Search less, analyse more
The majority of business professionals spend too much time searching and not enough analysing. Cogenta has been engineered to flip this model so that research occupies less time, thus creating more time for the analysis of information.
One of the most important technologies in the Cogenta software is its original relevancy ranking algorithms. These are built using its expertise in computational linguistics, for which a patent has been filed.
"The results appear with the most relevant hits at the top of the list. However, with a mouse click, results can be displayed by URL, date or topic," said Phillips.
"We want to nail down our approach to 'smart relevancy' quickly. Each time a user interacts with our list of hits, we are able to make adjustments to the algorithm's functions for a particular user.
"Over time, Cogenta delivers more relevant ranking of results because it learns from the user's actions."
Cogenta has other intelligence embedded in its software. For example, when a user enters a query, it performs a 'more like this' and a 'see also' search.
User actions instruct the spider to look for additional links on web pages that the user clicks on. Over time, new URLs are added to user queries.
"We build into Cogenta round-robin and queues for spidering. A user can set the type of timing function as well as how aggressively the spider visits sources," said Phillips. "The result is that Cogenta can mesh with typical office networks."
Because of the technology framework, Phillips sees numerous opportunities for tailoring Cogenta.
The software slips into small- and mid-sized organisations where the Verities and OpenTexts of the world don't appeal. Its licence fee is less than £1,000 compared to the five, six and seven figures asked by most search vendors.
What is Cogenta's secret ingredient?
Cogenta uses software modules which it calls "adaptors", and offers these for Verity, Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange.
The idea is that Cogenta can make available information from content repositories built by any of these products and merge it in relevance-ranked results pages.
The secret sauce for Cogenta is, according to Phillips, that "most of the enterprise products have no provision to allow a financial professional to get his must-see websites, for-fee financial data, and internal information in one indexed service under his control at all times. A user controls the Cogenta software, not a programmer."
One weakness in Cogenta is that it does not build a full text index of websites or internal content. Traditional keyword searching is somewhat slower than using a search engine from DT Search, for example.
However, this is also a Cogenta strength. By not having its own index it can never get old.
Cogenta also avoids the impossible goal of attempting to create a single universal index. (A beefed up search-and-retrieval tool is coming in a few months, according to Cogenta's engineers.)
"We have an aggressive development roadmap and an investor that wants us to expand rapidly," said Phillips. "We now have more than 200 business cards and several dozen hard leads."
But today's business climate is challenging, especially for start-ups. The unanswered question is, will Cogenta join Castle Hill as one of Farnham's top attractions in the coming year?
See also:
All
del.icio.us
Digg this
reddit!
