Month: March 2007

Robert Cringely writes:

Vector-based searching begins with making an index of words in a document. Using this column as an example, the software would examine all the words I have written here, throw away words that carry no real information — words like “the,” “and” and most verbs — then count the instances of each of the remaining words. Each word in the column becomes a vector in a multidimensional space. If I have used the word “Internet” 15 times in this column, then “internet” defines the direction of the vector and 15 is its length. Adding all the vectors in this column yields a single vector that represents the entire column in a multidimensional space defined by all the words in all the articles in the entire database.

Doing a search using this system is simply a matter of entering a natural-language query, which is parsed and indexed in exactly the same manner, yielding another vector. This search vector is plotted in the multidimensional space and the search results are those vectors (those articles) that are nearest in space to the query vector. The closer to the query vector an article vector lies, the more likely that article is to answer the question posed in the query.

EPrecis and now iReader use a similar approach, but where the actual words didn’t matter to Excite, they matter a LOT to these new products.

SeattlePI.com has excerpts of comments made by Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie: “As far back as pre-bubble there was a company called desktop.com, but ever since that era, technologists have been trying to test themselves and see how much of the Office experience we could take up into a browser and make it usable in some form. And in that realm, yes, there’s Google Docs & Spreadsheets, there’s ThinkFree, Zoho, there are a variety of different instances of people taking the tools and kind of replicating them up into a Web environment. … In the pure Web model, the trade-offs are fairly substantial. You have to be online in order to use them. Depending on whose version it is, there are different feature/function trade-offs. But the way I approach it and the way I view the services opportunity related to productivity is really about more than just taking what’s on the PC and putting it up on the Web. I think there are high-level scenarios that if you consider you’ve got software on PCs, services in the cloud and devices, mobile devices, as the power that you can work with, and you try to envision the value of productivity, and what you’re trying to offer, you end up with a different result.”

News.com writes:

Corporate managers concerned about the amount of time employees spend sifting though mountains of unwanted e-mail may soon have World of Warcraft to thank for providing a solution.

That’s because a Palo Alto, Calif.-based start-up called Seriosity has come up with an e-mail management system that borrows heavily from the virtual economies and currencies found in WoW and other large-scale online games.

Known as Attent, Seriosity’s system is essentially a new currency–called the Serio–that corporate e-mail users spend to indicate a message’s importance: the more important they believe the message is, the more Serios they spend on it. Recipients keep the Serios in the messages they get.

Similarly, when someone receives a message with Serios attached, they can indicate how important they believe it is by responding with an appropriate number: none or very few if they think the message wasn’t valuable, an equal number if they want the sender to know they appreciated the message, or more than the original number to show they agree that it truly was crucial.