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SOFTWARE
The Gist: High-concept Search Tool For Corporate Web Sites
Hosted AE1 Service: $25,000 Installation, $5,000 Per Month
I hate search engines. Web-wide queries tend to return irrelevant results, and dedicated search boxes on company sites often don't fare much better. I recently spent an hour at www.apple.com to find the right scanner drivers and turned up nothing. So when I checked out AnswerLogic's Answer Engine 1 (AE1), which aims to replace corporate search engines, I didn't have high hopes. But it surprised me by producing short, useful answers. It actually works.
As with sites like Ask Jeeves, you enter full questions, not just keywords. I experimented on AnswerLogic's own site. "How does your product work?" I asked. The first answer AE1 returned was: "In order to retrieve an answer, the Language Processor compares the conceptual representation of a question against the document concepts stored in the IdeaMap. Concepts that closely match are returned as answers. Read more ...." I clicked on the next link, and it whisked me to the passage in question, yellow-highlighted in one of the company's white papers. Very nice.
AE1 indexes the same material as any other site-specific search engine: FAQs, product updates, job listings, and everything else. But instead of just making the documents word-searchable, it processes them so that they're concept-searchable. A linguistic analyzer breaks the text into chunks that stand by themselves and convey one idea each. These single-concept snippets, along with the underlying logical statements they represent, are stored in a database called IdeaMap. Ask a question, and the system interprets what concepts you're after, then queries IdeaMap for a fitting response.
It's an old strategy, but one that's hard to execute well. In answering my deliberately vague query, AE1 was able to interpret the phrase "your product," and understand that "work" meant how something operates, rather than employment information. Such ambiguities have vexed natural-language systems for decades - which is why most have never been good enough for mass consumption. But AnswerLogic feels that its combination of academic-grade natural language-processing (NLP) and business expertise is ready for prime time. The company debuted AE1 on its own site in September, and the system now powers MoreBusiness.com and Insure.com. Any company can purchase the technology for a fee based on traffic.
Pluses aside, AE1 isn't foolproof. It choked on several variations of the question, "Who do I contact if I have a technical problem?" Still, I'd take the Answer Engine over waiting forever on hold any day.
AnswerLogic: +1 (202) 223 1444, www.answerlogic.com.
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