Demo07: Day 2, Afternoon: "Wisdom of the Algorithms"

The search for better search continues. But, as host Shipley said, we don’t want “search”; we want “find.” Entrants in the search for find included:

• Aggregate Knowledge
• ZoomInfo
• Trailfire, Inc.
• Reveal Technology, Inc.
• Helium, Inc.
• TextDigger, Inc.
• Iwerx, LLC
• blinkx, Inc.

Aggregate Knowledge: More Like This or More Like That
In one of Demo’s more polished presentations, founder & CEO Paul Martino demonstrated a “Collective Discovery Service” that lets users find products similar to those they’re looking for. After finding an item in a catalog, Aggregate’s “discovery window” offers users additional places to continue reading or research, using a real-time “behavior analysis engine” to watch what people actually choose to click on. For marketers using the service on their site, a node tree interface offers a visual display of the ways in which the information people are searching for is interrelated. It’s seemingly effective: Martino claimed that 20% of the products purchased on Overstock.com during the last holiday season were bought because of recommendations made by the company’s technology. But perhaps most unusual is the company’s business model: AN’s is purely pay-for-performance, making money only if its clients actually sell more using its software.

ZoomInfo: I’ll Be Watching You
If you subscribe to the belief that marketers really need more complete and organized information about people and companies, then ZoomInfo is for you. The company aggregates search result information, and “normalizes” it in a useful manner so the format is similar. Russell Glass, VP Marketing, says its PowerSearch can, for example, find all the companies that compete in the identity management space that Symantec is currently focused on. He says ZoomInfo maintains detailed profiles on 3.5 million companies and 34 million people. It’s either scary or inevitable, depending on your perspective: If you’re a marketer, you’ll find this kind of information to be a huge asset; if you’re an individual who’s the inevitable target of marketers, you’ll be afraid. Very afraid.

Trailfire: Digital Breadcrumbs
To describe the value of his company’s offering, CEO and co-founder John O’Halloran invoked the name of Vannevar Bush, an early thinker about the “trail” of information we follow as individuals that showed a prescient vision for something like the World Wide Web. User can annotate Web information, if they choose, in a series of pages by using the same “trail” tag. That lets other users walk through the same sequence of pages, reading comments like hearing a story. The process works in Firefox and Explorer, but a browser extension is needed to make new trails. Anyone can comment on a mark, but it’s not clear how Trailfire stops comment spam.

Reveal Technology: Revealing Documents
CEO & founder Laurent Meynier, VP Marketing Patty Harris, and “colleagues” Jill and Jeff collaborated on a demo of a “lightweight, peer-to-peer application” for sharing documents and unstructured data inside and outside the organization. Once a local application is installed, colleagues are added to groups. Documents are shared using a special “save as” option in standard desktop applications, automatically becoming visible to specific groups and individuals. Meynier says the software caches shared and indexed documents, so files are available even when other users are offline. Documents can be tagged with metadata, and organized accordingly. From the demo, the application looks very much like Ray Ozzie’s Groove, technology that seems to have disappeared into the maw of Microsoft. The company plans to open up for a beta “in about a month,” said Meynier.

Helium: Weighting and Rating
Founder Mark Ranalli and VP Sales & Marketing Andrew Ressler demonstrated a content filtering platform that looks like functions much like Slashdot.org and similar content rating sites – but with a twist. “What do you do with a billion voices” on the Internet? asked Ranalli. “Can you listen to all of them?” The answer is obviously No, so the company has come up with a way to rate contributed articles that Ranalli says is “un-gameable.” To evaluate content, users are presented with two articles: Pick which one you like better, a or b. Helium then rates articles automatically from 1 through 27 (why?), and content that’s worth reading rises to the top. The assumption is that writers can then be paid on the value of their contributions. Ranalli says all of the site’s content is user-contributed – 160,000 articles to date, submitted by 40,000 members. He believes that Helium’s technology allows users weigh in on emotional issues, and receive the “best” perspective from all that’s contributed. Unlike Slashdot, though, Helium doesn’t seem to depend on an individual’s reputation – but is that omission good or bad?

TextDigger: Intuitive “Find”?
Tim Musgrove, CEO of TextDigger, says his company offers “an alternative to Google for pesky alternative queries.” He showed a Google search: “Hotel with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge.” Only one out of the first page of hits was a good fit for what he wanted. Instead of straight text analysis, he said, TextDigger parses related words and synonyms, and makes some “intuitive” leaps about the context for what you meant. He then showed a TextDigger search of the same term, with a variety of hotels all shown on the first page. Interestingly, “hostel” showed up, but gets a slightly lower ranking, because it’s like a hotel but not exact. To illustrate the complexity of TextDigger’s parsing engine, Musgrove showed a hundred different takes on what the word “view” could have meant. Interestingly, TextDigger is primarily funded by CNET Networks.

Iwerx: The Anti-Splog
“If you’re a blogger…do you have any way to know if the content you’re putting out there isn’t being plagiarized without your authorization?” asked Ed Lachcik, CEO and COO. He claims that of the 30-70,000 new blogs created daily, 30-45% are “splogs,” sites that take content without credit. Using Iwerx’ Sentinel, a blogger can search for plagiarizing splogs, add white and black lists based on what you see as the authorized or unauthorized use of your content, and ultimately tag unrepentant sploggers.

Blinkx: Pop-pop-popup Video
Surango Chandratillake, founder & CTO, occupied the final demo slot with wit and grace. Blinkx is  well-known video clip site. Its new feature: By clicking on a link on the Blinkx home page and choosing a popular blog platform, users can drop some brief code into their blog site, incorporating links to Blinkx video that has some connection to the content in the blogs. Chandratillake acquitted himself well. Take note: A good sense of humor and a British accent are both highly recommended characteristics of the final Demo slot.

gB

Comments

[felix]

While I too enjoyed Blinkx' presentation, I have a serious question about the economic value of video search as a whole. What is the dollar value (if I can be so blunt) of someone searching for something which ultimately will be consumed in a passive way vs. someone who is actively PULLING data from the web. I would argue that a user who actively looking for things is a more valuable customer - or in other words, in a mode which is more immediately monetizable.

yes, the media industry has shown that there is money to be made interspersing ads into content streams or product placement. BUT Television programming has been polished and selected based on the type of content that makes people want to buy. e.g. Friends, Cosby Show, etc. The narrative is not in conflict with consumer behavior / state of mind. That is why Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn while enormously interesting speakers (to some) do not tend to put their users into modes which advertisers find particularly receptive to ad messaging.

Therefore, undifferentiated video search seems useful to the end user, but merely a feature in a suite of features that are only monetizable by a company who, like Yahoo, has many other things to keep you hanging around.

[Gary A. Bolles]

Felix: Long term, I'd agree; it's the larger platforms that are the most likely to (someday) offer the best experience for video search. But in the near term, it's also likely that a startup will find the best combination of reach and ease that will capture a large chunk of attention. MySpace and YouTube have yet to generate significant ad dollars for their owners, but that didn't stop them from being valuable properties...

gB