"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!