Filed under: Search, Technology | Tags: patents, patents search, patsnap, Search
Singaporean Start-up Patsnap launched the Alpha-version of their portal last week which aims to bring patent search to a new level of simplicity and enable research to be done more easily. This puts the company in direct competition with Google’s Patent Search functionality that was launched in 2006. Google’s Patent Search, in my opinion, has been the most intuitive search engine within this arena thus far.
In its website, Patsnap mentioned that “coupled with the initial work done on the clustering technology and relevant feedbacks from the users, this search engine can be further improved for enhanced search results.” This is one of the key fundamental differences between their algorithm and Google’s as Google’s depends solely on computational methods to determine the order of search results. This is similar to how Mahalo competes with Google using semantic search.
This Alpha release seems to have only one of the 3 core functionalities that the completed site will eventually provide. The homepage hints that they will subsequently launch a social networking function and perhaps a mechanism that allow users to find all patents associated with a certain device.
After several test runs, I realized that Patsnap, even in its alpha stage, is able to equal Google Patent Searches’ capabilities and produce comparable results. In fact, I actually do prefer the layout that Patsnap provides which places the actual patent documentation on the same screen than Google which requires you to navigate to another page to see it. However, Google does have a functionality that may be more useful which shows the links of other patents that references the one you are viewing. Perhaps for the professional researcher, they may have different opinions on the quality of the search result, but for the average user like a typical college student or ad-hoc researcher, this may very well be what they are looking for.
Google Patent Search has not changed much since its launch other than perhaps its underlying search algorithm, and this makes it highly possible that the completed version of Patsnap would be able to provide a better solution than that of Google’s.
Filed under: Book Reviews, Search, Technology | Tags: Book Review, Google, Search, The Search
The full name of this book is actually “The Search – How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture”. The author of this book John Battelle was the co-founding editor of Wired Magazine and is now the founder and chairman of Federated Media, a company that manages advertising for some of the most visited blogs such as Boing Boing, GigaOm and Techcrunch.
As you can see from the title, this book is not entirely about Google but also talks about the other search companies, some that have already ceased to exist, and also the search industry in general. However, Google being the indisputable leader in search, it is inevitable that they are mentioned most within the book. The book starts by addressing the dynamics of the search process, i.e. the who, what, when, whys. It also talks about the fundamental technologies behind search in layman terms.
The book then goes into the early players of search such as Lycos, Alta Vista and Yahoo. The story of how Google was formed within the labs of Stanford University was then discussed with focus on the famous PageRank algorithm. A chapter was then dedicated to the pay per click model and how goto.com came up with the idea with Google adopting a similar model in the form of Adwords.
The rest of the book is entirely about Google and how it tries to stick with their “not to be evil” mantra even though going public, the federal government and countries such as China forces them to deviate from their original believes. The book then ends with what the author perceives the future of search will be like.
This book doesn’t introduce any profound theories about technology, but gives a very in depth analysis of search and the economy that surrounds it. It will be a interesting read for people interested in the technical aspect of web technology and less so for the business centric reader unless they have a vested interest in search.
Filed under: Search, Technology | Tags: A*Star, Search Technology, Singapore
Singapore’s premier research facility, A*STAR (Agency for Technology and Research) has launched a competition called “The Star Challenge 2008″ last week to develop “a rich media search engine that will be smart enough to identify text, audio and video containing any word, even if that word, or search term, has not yet been tagged in the internet material”.
The prize money for this competition is set at USD$100,000 and participants will have eight months from now to build such a technology. An international advisory panel consisting of renowned experts from UC Berkeley, University of Washington, University of Columbia and National University of Singapore have been invited oversee the competition.
I highly doubt that this competition will really accelerate the ongoing research in this area as this has already been a hot research topic for quite some time now and progress would be at its full speed. Such a product in its commercial form will definitely be worth a few million and USD$100k seem so trivial in the scheme of things. I believe the winner of the competition will be someone who is already building such a product and sees this merely as an opportunity to get more research funds. John Battelle, who wrote the most successful book on the story of Google, and search technology blog, Search Engine Land, has both agreed that this competition will not have any notable results.
If you are interested to participate in the competition, register at the competition’s official website which in my opinion have a tat too much flash animations.
Filed under: Search, Technology | Tags: Flight information, Google, Search
Google announced on its blog this morning a cool new feature on its search engine. Now you are able to check if the flight is on time or delayed just by typing the flight number into the google search bar and a result like the one you see below will appear. Apparently, Google gets this information on Flightstats.com which has an interface that is far more complex.
Just like the Google Maps, I would expect the initial coverage not to be as detailed in Asia as it is in the US, but after doing some test searches even on Asian budget airlines, I was able to get accurate results on every instance. Another great innovation from the guys at Google.
Filed under: Search, Technology | Tags: human-powered search, Mahalo, Mahalo Daily, Search, Veronica Belmont
Mahalo is a human powered search engine that gives you results to your search terms that are hand-picked by their staff. They have around 40 full time staff adding result pages for each search term daily and are estimated to have 10,000 result pages by the end of the year. Each result page can then cater to several different queries of the same category.
If a search term is not yet indexed by Mahalo, they will then display Google search results in their page. Human powered search may indeed give better results than those that run on algorithms as systems may frequently misinterpret the user’s intentions. Also, the problem with algorithm-based searches is that people are able to game the systems (this is where SEO come in) but there’s no way (except bribery) to affect the results on human-powered searches.
Robert Scoble has even predicted that Mahalo may be able to overthrow Google within 4 years though he got flamed pretty bad for his argument.
Also check out their daily show, the Mahalo Daily, where Veronica Belmont who used to work for CNET talks about anything from cleaning your keyboard to the new Tesla electric car.
Update: Mahalo has announced that it has hit 25,000 result pages in Dec 2007, the target they have set for Dec 2008.
