Monday (04/21/2008) is Alternative Search Engines Day in San Francisco. Charles Knight and the good folks at ReadWriteWeb were kind enough to invite us to participate and share our perspective on NLP search. The sponsoring search engines for this invitation-only event are SeeqPod, UpTake, Matchpoint, HealthPricer, and GoPubMed.
See you there.
For most people who visit BooRah.com, they see a website with restaurants reviews, ratings and related information. Underneath the ratings and reviews is a platform that understands human sentiment and extracts subjective attributes from reviews and blogs across the Internet.
For a few hours yesterday, we had a great opportunity to meet and mingle with fellow technologists pioneering the world of semantic web. Powerset, hosted the inaugural semantic happy hour and metaweb, radar networks and trueknowledge attended the very informal but fun event. Powerset and TrueKnowledge previewed their search engines which are to be released in the coming weeks.
Above picture shows Mark Johnson (Powerset on the right) and Shrisha(BooRah on the left) and me (Nagaraju, BooRah) in the middle.
We had a great time at the happy hour and thoroughly enjoyed meeting peer pioneers in the world of semantic web. Thanks to Mark Johnson and Barney Pell for taking the initiative to host this and inviting us.
Next week, at the Alt Search Engines Meetup, I will also be on a panel with Barney and William on NLP search. See you there.
Stephanie Hobbs has a good post on Search Engine Land about local mobile search and how the yellow page organization are looking at the landscape to brace for new generation of smarter and powerful mobile devices. According to the article, key attributes that need to be made easily accessible for mobile applications are:
While these are critical elements, I believe consumers are going to expect information such as reviews, ratings, pictures and videos as well. Form factor and user interface continue to be issues, but the adoption of mobile applications including local search will be based to large extent on whether all the content can be seamlessly accessed on web browsers as well as mobile devices.
Newsweek’s Tony Dokoupil has an interesting article suggesting that era of wisdom of crowds is fast becoming the past. We at BooRah, don’t think so!
Recently, I wrote an extensive article titled what beats Zagat? that discusses Restaurant Ratings and Reviews on BooRah. It provides one explanation on how automated systems can leverage content created by the crowd and can perform much better against, so called experts. At the end of the day there is no right or wrong but there are two aspects to be looked at.
A case can be made that experts have been the single voice and thereby perceived as the authority for a long time. Many reviews for movies, restaurants and events were rated by experts and they could make or break the business through their influential commentary, even though many of us disagreed with the expert. What the Internet has done is democratized the influence process. If I can trust my friend Joe more than Michael Bauer, that’s my choice, but at least I have a choice. At the end of the day, that’s always a good thing.
As for coverage, no expert/system of experts can come close to contributions from getting the masses involved. The level of participation depends on the complexity and pervasive nature of subject in discussion. E.g, for restaurants or movies, the crowds can be a lot more effective than any one expert who can can only cover a small fraction of the domain.