Priceless Paintings from W7

You’ll all know Google, of course. Even the Oxford Dictionary knows about “to google,” a remarkable accomplishment and clever marketing. Few other companies have impacted daily life of so many people so severely, and so quickly.

However, one should never forget that others are really, really, keen to get a slice of Google’s market share, and thus breed pretty daughters, too.

Through some strange coincidence, I discovered Exalead recently. A strange name that won’t ever enter the English language and the Oxford Dictionary, but what the heck?

Hmm, pretty much like Google, I thought. Since Wolfram caused nothing but hype and disappointment so far, and because it was lunch time, I took a closer look.

Oh. Nice! Fast returns, and a nice clickable tool on the far right to narrow down the search. (Others have also found Exalead noteworthy.) The speed will probably reduce as their index and user base builds up, but for now, it’s really nice.

Next, I looked into the free Exalead desktop search tool (EDS) – Google Desktop Search (GSD)struggled with Outlook integration for some while now, and not having shares in Google, I felt free to try Exalead.

Oh. Nice, again! Super-fast indexing, and much better local search results than any other desktop search engine that I tried before. Although slower than GDS, EDS offers a superb tool to narrow down the local search results, much better than all the others.

I was just about to become an Exalead convert when I found out that the Internet search results simply weren’t as good as Google’s (although they were the second best that I have seen so far). Desktop search was brilliant, but incompatible with an essential software tool needed in my work (the Perforce source control client), so I had to give up on Exalead all together.

They never bothered to say Thank you when I told them about the incompatibility, so I guess it serves them right. T’is French anyway.

Web/Tech Google, search engine;, Semantic Web, Web Revolution, wolfram

There’s quite a hype around Wolfram, a web 2 search engine that could change it all. You know what?

Change is needed, but Wolfram –as it stands today- is nowhere near it. The best thing is that Wolfram is polite about its failures: Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input it says to most of my queries. Queries that I know and trust and rely to succeed on Google.

There was a time when this site here came up top for Leberwurst West London and similar important queries. Although this site appears to have dropped somewhat in Google’s esteem, they’re still better than Wolfram’s pathetic Sorry.

What is needed is semantic analysis. Everyone knows that. Oh, yes. I should better stop rambling here and finish that Zemanta-based research tool which I drafted months ago, and put to sleep over the past few months.

It’s high time to show Wolfram its Eureka! moment.

Web/Tech Google, search engine;, Semantic Web, Web Revolution, wolfram

I was looking into ways of making sense of this. The buzzword is the semantic web, or web 3.0, but actually, this doesn’t stop at the web. The goal is to throw a piece of text, such as this article or any other textual information, written in a human language, at a machine.

The machine would then think about it, and reply with information that describes what the input text is all about.

This semantic analysis leads to better categorising, and better retrieval, of information. The next generation Google, if you want.

I was looking into OpenCalais first. They provide the first tier of such an analysis, extracting keywords such as Paris or England from a text, telling me one is a city and the other a country. That’s pretty nifty for a machine.

I even wrote a Windows Live Writer plug-in that tries to make sense of OpenCalais’ output, but I wasn’t really getting where I wanted to be. Well, not within an 8 hour effort anyway.

Then I found Zemanta, and I am in love.

While I am writing this article (in Windows Live Writer), the Zemanta plug-in automatically supplies clever links to enrich my text. All the links in this text are automatically generated by Zemanta; some explain keywords through Wikipedia, others go to Google Maps, or product or company home pages.

Zemanta also suggests images (none used here), keywords (tags), and provides a list of suggested external links, leading to other articles elsewhere on the web, concerned with the same issues.

Isn’t that totally super hyper übercool?

It is.

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Web/Tech OpenCalais, Search Engines, Semantic Web, Windows Live Writer, Zemanta