August 31, 2007

A challenge to DMOZ bashers

Give or take a corrected typo, here’s a challenge to DMOZ bashers I just wrote in the flame war thread.

If you want to do something that is:

A. Correct
B. Credible
C. Potentially useful

just go find a specific category with terrible listings, and publicize the fact with overwhelmingly clear proof of your assessment.

If that’s not EASY for you to do … then maybe DMOZ isn’t so bad after all, eh?

In particular, I’d encourage you to post a version of the category that is clearly better than what is currently there.

Technorati Tags: ,

August 31, 2007

DMOZ — yet another flame war

My latest thoughts about DMOZ and the ODP may be found in this blog comment thread.

The gist is:

Or something like that. As I said, it’s a flame war …

Anyhow, I’m flying off on a two-week snorkeling trip Saturday, and should be much mellower soon.

August 3, 2007

The case for Inxight Awareness Server

I’ve been pretty skeptical about Inxight’s Awareness Server. My theory is that ordinary enterprise search engines can index remotely anyway, and they offer much better search functionality. Inxight’s Ian Hersey was kind enough to write in and offer two counter-arguments.

First, Ian points out that there are circumstances when, due to security and permissions, you can’t really index everything via one search engine. Specifically, he offers the government as an example. OK, I can see that in the government, with its classified and/or regulated silos. However, I have trouble thinking of many more examples. While there certainly are plenty of instances where a variety of organizations share information on a somewhat arms-length basis, it’s tough to think of such cases where federated text search would come into play.

Second, Ian in essence disputes my claim of inferior functionality. While implicitly conceding — as well he should! — that Inxight’s Awareness Server doesn’t do some things full-featured search engines do, he points out analytic features that may not be found in conventional search engine offering. The big one he calls out is faceted search — which of course was the core of Intelliseek, the acquisition Awareness Server came from. Hmm. Faceted search has a checkered history, with Excite and Northern Light being perhaps the most visible among many failures. On the other hand, it’s a great idea that keeps being tried, and some versions — notably Endeca’s — have turned out well.

I guess I’ll have to reserve judgment on that part until I look at Inxight’s product and see what they do and don’t actually have.

August 3, 2007

More on text processing in CEP

StreamBase isn’t the only complex event/stream processing (CEP) vendor doing text processing. Progress Apama is as well. Stemming, fuzzy matching, and so on seem to happen all the time. But there’s also at least one case where they flat-out do sentiment analysis.  Edit:  I presume this is in the investment market, as that’s where most of Progress Apama’s business is. Read more

Feed including blog about text analytics, text mining, and text search Subscribe to the Monash Research feed via RSS or email:

Login

Search our blogs and white papers

Monash Research blogs

User consulting

Building a short list? Refining your strategic plan? We can help.

Vendor advisory

We tell vendors what's happening -- and, more important, what they should do about it.

Monash Research highlights

Learn about white papers, webcasts, and blog highlights, by RSS or email.