Sunday, October 17, 2010

Research Engine - A new identity

Well, this is yet another series on my TGMC project this year, "Research Engine". I've been thinking off late so much about Research engine, especially after my break up with my girl few weeks ago.

"If i would make it a search engine, it would still like be one of them. May be one with a better filtering capability of all others, but there is no innovation in that. Search is still not a solved problem! I still believe in that, but what can Research Engine can possibly achieve?!", said me to myself.

I was pondering over this for a long time, until now. I again came up with a new improved version of Research Engine, one already but not completely visualized by my team mate, Salaikumar @ Saravanan (http://goo.gl/tfrx).

We came up with another way of representing information to the users. All search engine, gives you pages and pages of links, to some so-called relevant information for your search query. We though why not give the users directly the information what they are looking for, instead of giving them links to go and search from.

So we decided to have a user view layer like that. It is information centered (re)search, so that you don't have to re-search again else where.

Well you should be thinking, "Isn't this what Wikipedia does in the first place?". Actually the answer is, "Yes!". You can also call Research Engine to be the next encyclopedia, but the potential of RE is more than just displaying information.

Major features or improvements over a wiki is that,
  1. All the data collection process is completely automated.
  2. All the information you see is live data (possibly some milliseconds old)
  3. All the information you get is presented after analysis of same content over a variety of authenticated websites.
That is with this post as of now. If you feel, RE can have more features or if you have a suggestion for the same, please drop your views on the issue, as comments. As i said, i want this to be a community driven Web 3.0 Technology, that makes the lives of the people easier.

- Ashwanth Kumar

7 comments:

urbaneolithic said...

And I'm assuming, as more and more people begin to use it, it will learn and evolve?

Spar!!! said...

Your concept, at first, needs to be duly appreciated.. Indeed a pretty good thought of developing a research engine.. But won't tat cause you to lose on the speed front? I mean anyone - even you - would want to get more information in less time.. As you say that you are planning to present the page itself, instead of the links, will it not be a)comparatively slower than the present day search engines and b)too tedious to search for the end user as he is not given with options to select from, rather he is given what the engine feels to be the best? I would really like to know how do you plan to address that.. And do correct me if I have misunderstood your concept..

Ashwanth Kumar said...

@Urbanneolithic yes it'll learn along with users.

@spar Thanks for the compliment. Let me tell you how I've planed to address those. I'll not loose any speed, as the data is represented and given in rdf. The crawling, analysis, etc. takes place in the server. The relationship among various entities are already made and required processing done.
Well, its not too tedious. Research engine gives you everything available on the respective entity. They also get a choice of more links or resources section on the page, that'll give them raw links.

Basically, research engine is for people who need information and not pages and pages of raw links. :)

Nivas said...

"We though why not give the users directly the information what they are looking for, instead of giving them links to go and search from"

Isnt that what Wolfram|Alpha does? (Its that plus a lot more)
http://www.wolframalpha.com/

How does RE differ from Wolfram|Alpha?

And, when it comes to aggregating and presenting meaningful information from unstructured data on the web, Id like to refer to Google Squared.
http://www.google.com/squared/

Ashwanth Kumar said...

Nivas, thanks for pointing out to me about google squared. That's exactly what I wanted research engine to be. Plus a bit more.

I'm not sure about wolfram alpha, as of now it doesn't differ much from that. In a way RE, is a downgraded version of wolfram.

NIVI said...

How does google squared works? I could not find the exact detail I want. It seems to be more complicated for a layman like me to find the exact info we need. If at all u r goin to present the exact info page, then will u present it as wikipedia pages with no diverting links and with the 3 features u said?? :-(

Ashwanth Kumar said...

Nivi, that's how exactly the pages will be. google squared helps to extract information from unstructred sources. Do it for a general term like bill gates. You'll know how it works.

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