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Retail Fashion

Search as an application is coming into fashion in the general case

May 2010/in /by

Google just entered the world of faceted search, following in Bing’s footsteps, and it’s a good move. John Battelle, wrote a strong piece on what they are doing “Google Steps Gingerly Toward Search As Application” and on why this is a necessary move for Google — to deliver search as an application rather than as purely simple keyword search. I couldn’t agree with him more.

It’s good that Google is taking this step for the consumer, and it’s a step professional search based applications have already taken – they just have to be a great deal higher productivity than consumer applications, because in the office time is money.

If you are a FirstRain user you know the benefits of this approach are to get you instantly to the businesses, ecosystem and analytics around your question to help you make a decision quickly. The wind power example Google used in it’s announcement is a good one to look at.

In the Google case here are the results you get:


The results include news and information from traditional media sources, nongovernmental organizations and online sources such as Wikipedia. The left-hand navigation offers the ability to refine results by time and by news, blogs, images, books and more. Related search terms such as solar power, hydropower and geothermal energy are also listed. It’s definitely a big improvement over early technologies.

But for a sales or marketing person what you need is fresh, business relevant results and navigation for the businesses in the industry and the ecosystem of companies engaged in the wind energy industry — wind power generation and distribution. Recent events, industry trends, people-related changes and management turnover are all detectable and attached to the search results. For example, users can identify planned commercial wind-turbine installations; track key components, parts and raw materials used in their construction; and identify suppliers poised to benefit from investments in wind power. Up-to-the minute reports can be delivered regularly via email or mobile phone so that users stay on top of new developments.

Here’s the contrasting screen shot – and in FirstRain you can navigate through management teams, competitors, hot topics and all the other elements of the ecosystem from here – which is what intelligent business search can give you.

data

Quality of (re)search – it’s all about the Metadata

Apr 2009/in /by

Your average search engine user has the patience of a toddler – they expect to leverage one or a few keywords to get the answer they are expecting and they’ll only try once or twice before giving up. If the results are bad, they’re not likely to try again – you’ve lost a user, or customer.

This is a hard problem to solve when the user is a senior professional looking for business information about a competitor – or the market trend behind a stock’s movement.

FirstRain is all about only the highest quality, high precision results for professional users and a critical piece of our system behind our results is our rich Metadata library. To put it simply, Metadata is data about data; for us, it’s the information architecture that captures what the documents in our system are about – and they can be about any number of concepts drawn from the thousands we’ve modeled. They can be literal (this is about Apple Computer) or they can be crossed by any number of building blocks (this is about layoffs at Motorola in Illinois).

The base layer of FirstRain is the categorization engine that identifies and tags what an article is about – a company, a market trend, an event. Since these tags determine what users see when doing research in our system (and remember – no patience with poor results), the rules that go into identifying them need to be spot on. For example, it’s necessary to ensure a new video game launch from a company like Electronic Arts is tagged appropriately, but a blog about how to reach new levels in one of their games is ignored. A single web document may have any number of tags reflecting the content in it. The article about Electronic Arts could also mention other relevant information about competitors and partners, as well as trends like video game sales; and it’s important to identify and tag each appropriate facet.

But just tagging the data to the right topics is only half the magic. Imagine what you can do if you can also analyze the frequencies of the Metadata. Keep in mind we have millions of documents in FirstRain, each containing numerous tags telling us what it’s about and where it’s from. Go back to the Electronic Arts example: FirstRain can identify the number of times EA is mentioned in conjunction with any related topic, such as new products, or any other company. We highlight spikes in these counts for our users and so show up emerging trends in number of mentions above or below their competition. These counts can give great insight into what a company is doing, or is about to do.

By treating the Metadata as a database in itself, and analyzing it for spikes and patterns we can identify emerging trends for users that they simply could not see from even the highest quality individual search results.

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