In Grokking Transparensee, John Battelle of the said the following: This is powerful stuff when you think about it …
and it solves a core database search issue, at least for me: you know there is the right answer for the query you are entering, but damned if it isn’t escaping you, due to the blunt nature of structured search.
LInk: Battelle – Grokking Transparansee
He’s referring to Transparensee‘s Discovery Search Engine. He did a decent job of explaining what it is, but it’s really one of those “you really have to try it before you’ll get it” technologies.
Luckily Steve Lavine (the founder and CEO of Transparensee Systems) walked me through a few demos some time ago. As their site indicates, the technology can be applied to a variety of “vertical search” markets:
It’s pretty cool stuff. I expect that we’ll see a lot more of this in the coming months. Searching structured databases really shouldn’t be any harder than searching the web, but it often is. The “fuzzy” searching capabilities their technology adds does a good job of closing that gap.
The more I think about it, I realize that this is the perfect case of a product that could benefit from a screencast. I’ll mention that to Steve.
Jeremy Zawodny is the author of the popular Jeremy Zawodny’s blog. Jeremy is part of the Yahoo search team and frequently posts in the Yahoo! Search blog as well.
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