IBM vs. Content Chaos

ps writes "IBM's Almaden Research Center has been featured for their continued work on "Web Fountain", a huge system to turn all the unstructured info on the web into structured data. (Is "pink" the singer or the color?) IEEE reports that the first commercial use will be to track public opinion for companies. " It looks like its feeding ground is primarily the public Internet, but it can be fed private information as well.

Comments

Re:Get this setup

[orac2]

Although the article didn't have room to go into this point (and I should know, I'm the author), IBM can completley compartmentalize competitors' data, even if hosted in house (IBM already does this in other parts of its business). If companies are still wary, they can host the data themselves and let WebFountain troll it on a need to know basis.

Like NorthernLight?

[dpbsmith]

This sounds very similar to NorthernLight.

NorthernLight was (it still exists, but apparently is not available to the nonpaying public at all) a search engine that displayed its results automatically sorted into as many as fifteen or twenty categories, automatically generated on the basis of the search. (For some reason, they called these categories "custom search folders.")

Since it's no longer available to the public I can't give a concrete example. I can't test it to see whether a search on "Pink" creates a couple of folders labelled "Singer" and "Color," for example. But that's exactly the sort of thing it does/did.

I actually would have used NorthernLight as one of my routine search engines--it worked quite well--had it not been for another major annoyance: in the publicly available version, it always searched both publicly available Web pages and a number of fee-based private databases, so whatever you searched for, the majority of the results were in the fee-based databases and I would have had to pay money to see what they were. In other words, it was heavy-handed promotion of their paid services and had only limited utility to those who did not wish to by them).