Google's Secret Plot

So, after writing 5 data sheets in 24 hours, I thought I'd head over to You Tube for a little R&R. 20 minutes of videos (and complete non-productivity) later, I've come to realize that Google's secret plot to take over the world is entirely based on its ability to bring worker productivity to a screeching halt.

First, there was Google search. The ability to turn an innocent search like "unstructured data management" into a 3-hour boondoggle involving elephants and hot travel spots in Pakistan.

Then there was Google news. This enables me to get, in my email box, hot news updates every day on AS MANY TOPICS as I like. Even news stories that are 3 years old get follow ups. (Anyone remember the poor woman who got beaned on the head by a wayward Macy's parade balloon?)

Now, Google's bought You Tube...by far the most devilish time waster yet.

When are you going to buy eBay?

FREE Inxight Search Extender for Google Desktop

If you've stumbled on this, I’d like to welcome you to be one of the first people to try out our new FREE product – Inxight Search Extender for Google Desktop.

Powered by Inxight's award-winning extraction technology, Inxight Search Extender for Google Desktop is an easy-to-install application that extends Google Desktop to "go the extra mile" -- helping users find documents faster and locate hidden information in document sets and individual documents.

Search results from Google Desktop are automatically clustered on-the-fly, enabling users to filter their results sets by the people, companies, places, concepts and other information contained within them.

Keyword-in-context summaries are enhanced by an automated "Top Mentions" list, revealing the most important people, places, companies and other information contained within the full text of a document - helping users quickly get a better sense of the true content of a document.

An automated document index makes it easy to see what key information is contained within documents, making it easier to locate that one mention of a potential new competitor within a large pdf file.

You can download the product by visiting http://www.inxight.com/products/se_google/registration.php .

It’s a 64MB download, and requires Google Desktop (available from Google) and the Microsoft .NET framework (included in the zip file – “dotnetfx.exe”) to run.

Let us know what you think of it by emailing ise at inxight dot com. We’ll be officially publicizing it the first week of October.

Making Sense of the Masses

Way back in 99, I used to work for a company called iSyndicate, which made a product called Express, geared toward helping individual content creators (columnists, cartoonists, etc) distribute their content.

I still believe in the dream (and apparently, so does The Colbert Report) - where the masses can freely share information, ideas, research, and so forth. The problem these days (for most of the developed world) is no longer that there is not enough content, but that it's nearly impossible to make sense of it all and find anything actually useful.

Ever try Google blog search? The number of blogsites that pick up pieces of every release known to man in order to drive traffic is astonishing. My favorite one was when we had a product release about a "Search Extender for Google"...which was dutifully appended and retitled "Inxight adds Google Search (Penis extender) to discovery platform". I kid you not.

So how do we expect some cancer researcher to know about some important paper that's been published without having to wade through 10 million Viagra (in various "tricky" spelling variant) websites?

That's my rant. I'd like to posit that Inxight's entity and fact extraction would solve the whole problem, but it won't -- not alone and not without support from some large organization to help us continue to develop and evangelize the solution -- and not without more people rising up to say how unhappy they really are with search today.

Hello? Who wants to dive in?

Will a Search Engine Provider PLEASE make these enhancements?

I'd even switch from my beloved Google if they happened. And I'm not just saying this because we (Inxight) have the technology to make it happen. I'm saying it as an avid web searcher.

1. An automated index in the cached view. It's hell trying to find any information in long documents. I want an index on the left-hand side which shows me the key people, companies, etc., mentioned in the document. Then I can just click on one of them and it would take me to where the first occurence of that "entity" is...and highlight them for me.

2. Page watch built into the system. I want to be able to tell the system to watch a particular page for changes and tell me when something's changed. It'd also be cool to be able to be notified every time a new document was added to the Google index about "Inxight" (or some other term). I use this in news.google.com all the time, but I want to know about more than just news. Both of these are features in Inxight's Awareness Server...


3. "Top mentions" in summaries and a way to filter results (like what Vivisimo does...Inxight does this, too)

4. The ability to make more intelligent queries like "Inxight and any mentioned within a sentence"

That's all for now!

Take Search the Extra Mile

Extending Enterprise Search with Google and Inxight

Thursday, June 15, 2006
11 AM PDT / 2 PM EDT
To register, visit
https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/onstage/tool/enrollee/register.php?ConfID=240452151&Rnd=24640300

Google and Inxight Software have teamed up to make it even easier to find documents, discover trends and find information within documents in the enterprise. Join us for a free webinar, hosted by Google and Inxight, in which we’ll demonstrate the combination of the Google Search Appliance and Inxight’s new Search Extender for Google.

In this webinar, we’ll demonstrate how the Google Search Appliance combined with Inxight’s Search Extender for Google can help you get more value from your information. The Google Search Appliance provides Google-quality search across your Web servers, file systems, portals, content management systems and relational databases. The Inxight Search Extender for Google integrates with the Google Search Appliance to enable users to filter search results sets and more easily navigate through documents, seeing at-a-glance automatically extracted people, companies, places, and other information.

Google...The Kleenex of Maps

Well, it finally happened today. Instead of telling someone "let me Mapquest that for you" I actually used the phrase "let me Google map that for you". I haven't used Mapquest in ages, but it remained as a residual phrase for me (ala "Kleenex" for facial tissue) until now.

Congrats to making it into that corner of my brain, Google!

Hey Google! Save Hangar One!

It would be a drop in the bucket for Google to pay to clean up Hangar One at Moffett Field...and they could slap a big Gooooogle logo on it. Very visible from the air, and would be a gift to the Mountain View/Sunnyvale era.

If Google doesn't do it, maybe Yahoo! will...

http://www.nuqu.org/

Save Hangar One!

Walking Directions on Google Maps

I'm going to basically copy here what another blogger has requested -- a "walking" option for Google maps... (http://www.bradlands.com/weblog/archives/2005/04/maps_made_for_w.shtml)

"I want a mapping and directions service that lets me choose between driving directions and walking directions. I most often make use of sites like Google Maps when I'm in a strange city or headed for an unfamiliar destination, but won't be taking a private car.

If I plug in a start point and destination, most map sites will give me directions that are perfectly logical for a driver, but don't allow for the fact that someone on foot can go places a car can't -- both ways on the sidewalks along a one-way street, for example. I was trying to put together directions for a friend to reach a hotel I'd recommended to them in Chicago, but both Mapquest and Google Maps would have me send them on a six-block roundabout route along Lake Shore Drive, when they could simply schlep their suitcase two blocks by turning onto a one-way street."

A Kudo This Time

This one's not a suggestion - it's a kudo! One of the hardest things to do with Google.com is to find the actual "real" hotel site for a New York hotel. When you query on the name, you're far more likely to find 3-4 pages of results from resellers.

However, when you do a search for the address on maps.google.com, you can click on the resulting pinpoint and it will give you the actual hotel URL. Bravo!

"Top Mentions" to Augment Google Keyword-In-Context Summaries

At Inxight, we have a Google add-on product that, among other things, can provide insight into the full-text content of documents at the summary stage.

It shows you the most relevant people, companies, places, etc., that are mentioned in the full text of the document.

This provides a better preview into the document's true contents. It lets me do several tasks more effectively, like competitive research and expert location.

For example, a typical Google keyword-in-context summary (Google desktop search for "linguist" looks like this:

Linguistics Symposium in 14th year.doc
said Davis. We are not just grammarians. While you certainly have to have an appreciation for many languages, being a linguist doesn’t mean knowing many

An Inxight-enhanced summary looks like this:

Linguistics Symposium in 14th year.doc
said Davis. We are not just grammarians. While you certainly have to have an appreciation for many languages, being a linguist doesn’t mean knowing many
Top Mentions: Alan Kaye; Colleen Davis; Elizabeth Closs Traugott; Stanford University; Stefanie Calvillo

How do we do this? Inxight has software that "reads" text in 32 different languages and, based on linguistics and patterns, can detect 35 different "entities" in that text -- people, companies, organizations, dates, currencies, concepts (like "unstructured data" or "global piracy"), etc.

I think it's pretty neat, and although it's not perfect, I'm still impressed by it daily.

Finding Greek Easter Bread

I'm a huge fan of Google and my company, Inxight, is a Google Enterprise partner. I was prompted to begin this blog because I thought it would be interesting to keep track of my "failed" searches and other musings on Google.

Today, I was unable to find a local purveyor of Greek Easter Bread (I would also have settled for Italian Easter Bread). While I did find a couple of Italian bakeries (search local: Italian Bakery), none of them had their offerings online, so I would have had to (gasp!) call to find out if they had Easter Bread. And I found some online purveyors, but I wanted the bread for tomorrow and didn't want to pay for FedEx.

So, I'll have to resort to the phone or my own oven to find some!