Search News and Seeing Data // TechnologyStory.com

Jul 01

Search News and Seeing Data

Posted by Matt Williamson on July 1st, 2008 technology Add comments

Microsoft Grabs Powerset

Powerset Logo Microsoft is bolstering its search strategy by buying Powerset today. If you are not familiar with Powerset, you will be. Powerset searches the Wikipedia site, nothing amazing there, but they do it in a slightly different way.

When you use a search engine on the Internet today, you are providing a keyword or phrase and the search engine tries to provide you results that best match your request according to an algorithm. Google does an excellent job when you ask for news articles about someone, or an event, or web pages with a certain bit of information, but try to ask for the names of the forests in Europe. Asking for data is one thing, but asking for answers, that is altogether more difficult.

Powerset uses a technology that they built to allow computers to understand human language. Semantic searching can be demonstrated simply with this example: ‘I want to see the Amazon’ vs. ‘the game was on Amazon’. A semantic search engine would see that, read it and know that the first is a statement about the region known as the Amazon, while the second is in reference to Amazon.com.

While Powerset is not ready to give us a window on the whole Web, they are showing us that the Wikipedia is more important than we might have thought. I only hope that Microsoft doesn’t gut Powerset and push it in to the other Microsoft search offerings, but rather uses that technology and grows Powerset as well.

Adobe Says Search Flash

Adobe Flash CS3 Logo Now that Adobe’s SWF file is opening up, Adobe has given code to the search engine giants Google and Yahoo that will enable them to more accurately search flash files. Google has been able to ‘look’ inside Flash files for years, in fact we ran tests a few years ago where we placed text inside the Flash files on one of my sites that was found nowhere else on the site, sure enough, Google indexed it and pointed to the page where that Flash was embedded. With Adobe’s help, now Google is proud to let us know that they are ’seeing’ the Flash file as a user would.

“We’ve developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed.” — Google

Video, audio and graphical content is still not indexed by the search engines, but this is a major step in the right direction. How long until Google Video is indexing the audio tracks from any Flash file it finds? That would open up all of YouTube and news streams from around the world.

Good job Adobe.

Seeing Data

Visual Complexity is Amazing Understanding information is a major challenge facing corporate IT departments world-wide. Visual dashboards have come a long way from the static bar graphs in your Excel files, but we still have a long way to go. We are close to the moment when data will fly around the screen in an organic, understandable, and intuitive way; allowing even the marketing types to understand digits for a change. (I am a marketing type, so I can say things like that.)

While some vendors have quickly taken advantage of new resources as they appear, on the IT side we are still waiting for a unified system. For instance, exposing data from your CRM application shows a window into the bowels of the corporation that beforehand only supply-chain personnel might have known about. If packages are stacking up in the warehouse because they cannot ship without cog 1.1, this is an issue. Now however, Flash-enabled dashboards, with click and drag functionality, allow us to see and manipulate the data in real time. This new window shows us how KPI would be affected by fluctuations in campaigns, sales, development cycles and other factors like manufacturing costs or fuel expenditures.

To get a view into the future of data visualization we only need to see a project called New York Talk Exchange, currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Using data provided by AT&T you can see all phone calls originating in New York City that are international in destination. Watch this Quicktime movie to see it in action.

Projects like the NYTE and others in that same vein are breaking open the flood gates of new ways we can see, understand and manipulate data. My children will think that data always moved around the screen in relationships that made sense. Yes, we will always have spreadsheets and accounting systems with static numbers on a grid layout, but we will also push a button and see those numbers come to life.

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