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Tool Searches in Context

Posted on: Monday, 12 December 2005, 12:00 CST

By Dawn Chmielewski, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.

Dec. 12--Here in Silicon Valley, we're search snobs. We act like the whole notion of searching the Web was practically invented here.

Certainly, with Google and Yahoo, we enjoy considerable bragging rights. But a little-known company out of Chicago has created a search assistant called Watson that turns the traditional seek-and-ye-shall-find approach to online information on its head.

Watson is a downloadable piece of software that sits in the corner of your computer screen, like AOL's Instant Messenger, and looks over your shoulder as you work.

Watson could well represent the next step in Web search. By adding intelligence and context to what is now mostly a popularity contest, the search results are clearly more relevant to you, although its desktop omnipresence (like an editor hovering over your words) can sometimes get on your nerves.

Instead of entering key words or phrases into a search box, Watson constantly scours the Internet for information related to the PowerPoint presentation you're reviewing, the Word document you're crafting, the e-mail you're reading or the Web site you're browsing.

So while you're at the Mercury News Web site reading the story about Google's former marketing executive Doug Edwards writing a blog about life in the Googleplex, Watson presents you with commentary and other blogs, such as from Technorati and John Battelle's Searchblog, and related stories on CNet and Bloomberg.

Watson examines the context of the words on screen to deliver relevant results from multiple sources -- the Web, online news sites, blogs and your own computer.

This approach is called contextual search. It was the outgrowth of research that co-founders Jay Budzik and his former computer science professor, Kristian Hammond, conducted in Chicago.

The two were hired to set up a computer system for the 1996 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Instead of automating the responses, the two worked behind the curtains, Wizard of Oz style, answering delegates' questions themselves -- just to get a sense of how people query machines.

Some questions, such as, "Where do I go to eat?" were so vague, as to be unanswerable. They lacked key details, such as the type of restaurant. It became clear that people don't always know how to effectively ask for what they want.

Budzik and Hammond developed the Watson intelligent agent that would extract meaning from the words on a page. (When we type "bank," do we mean the financial institution or the edge of a river?) This helps Watson work with conventional search indexes, such as Google or MSN, to invisibly structure queries that are longer and richer than any user would do for themselves, thus yielding better results.

Before the torrent of angry e-mails begins, let me acknowledge that Intellext, Budzik and Hammond's company, is not the first to offer contextual search. Yahoo has a product called Y!Q that uses contextual search to deliver better Web results, as does Blinx.

Google also has a sidebar to deliver to your computer information that you would normally get from a portal -- news of the day, stock tickers, weather forecasts. These news feeds are customized, based on your behavior over time.

Here's what makes Watson different. It doesn't give you information based on what you did yesterday, but rather, what's relevant to what you're doing right now.

And Watson delivers that information, regardless of whether you're typing conducting a search within a Web browser or reviewing a PowerPoint presentation about the energy consumption of big-screen TVs.

Watson is not without its drawbacks. It shrinks the real estate on your screen. And it can be distracting as the constantly updating search results produce a ticker-tape scroll in your peripheral vision.

Over the week or so of using Watson, the results were almost invariably on target -- except for one macabre result. While reading about the recent shooting of a terror suspect in Miami, Fla., it yielded 15 shopping-related purchases for the Wesley Snipes movie "Passenger 57."

I also discovered a fatal software conflict between my aged version of Microsoft Word and Watson, which caused Watson to become hung up and drain all my computer's system resources. I wouldn't suggest using this program unless you have a current (about 2003 or more recent) version of Microsoft Office.

Until now, Watson has been sold with a subscription fee to corporate customers such as AT&T and Motorola. Now it's available for free download from www.intellext.com.

Paraphrasing inventor Alexander Graham Bell, you may well find yourself exclaiming, "'Watson. Come here. I need you."

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Copyright (c) 2005, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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Source: San Jose Mercury News

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