Xerox Enters Search Market
Duncan Riley
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Xerox announced its entry into the search market this week with FactSpotter, document search software that is claimed to go beyond conventional keyword search.
FactSpotter is text mining software that combines a linguistic engine that allows users to make queries in everyday language. FactSpotter looks for the keywords contained in a query along with the context those words have.
According to Xerox, FactSpotter is capable of combing through almost any document regardless of the language, location, format or type; take advantage of the way humans think, speak and ask questions; and discriminate the results highlighting just a handful of relevant answers instead of returning thousands of unrelated responses.
Frédérique Segond, manager of parsing and semantics research at XRCE said that the tool is more accurate because it delves into documents, extracting the concepts and the relationships among them. “By understanding the context, it returns the right information to the searcher, and it even highlights the exact location of the answer within the document”.
Whilst it sounds appealing, FactSpotter will not be coming to a browser near anyone, anytime shortly. Xerox plans to launch FactSpotter next year as part of the paid Xerox Litigation Service platform and has no plans for a wider or public release. Here’s betting that a Steve Jobs character comes along and steals the concept and turns into the next Google; history often does repeat itself.
hmm… wow, search eh?
i hear that market is growing.
Xerox PARC is the source of Powerset’s NLP technology.
http://www.xerox.com/innovatio.....rset.shtml
“Whilst it sounds appealing, FactSpotter…”
There is something distinctly unappealing about that name I think.
Thanks for the info. I still reckon google will be the major search engine for years yet.
Does anyone know of a search engine that allows user ratings?
Seems like I would get better results if I could vote for which results were most relevant.
I guess I vote by clicking on a listing, but that doesn’t give me an option to tell the search engine what I was looking for if a desired listing isn’t there.
It would not be practical to have this technology on the general web - IT IS EXTREMELY resource demanding.
Which means that individual webpage updates would have to wait many months after being spidered.
And fewer sites would be added to the database
Perhaps this is the Web search technology of a few decades from now as hi tech improves
Other firms are already doing what Xerox is launching - this search technology is basically being used by large law firms
xerox has it right - domain- and task-specific search based on actual research and algorithms, and no silly social networking garbage. can’t say if it will work, but at least they have an actual application concept. and no “steve jobs” character will “steal” the idea because it’s not new. I know TC is all about hyping things it doesn’t really understand, but steve jobs and google in one sentence? that’s overdoing it, methinks.
“Xerox Litigation Service” formally known as “Amici” formally known as “ProductivityNet”. Still run by a convicted felon who is buddy buddy with David Boise (yes, that David Boise). Sounds like there is more to the story.
Love the comment about Steve Jobs Duncan, that is so true.
So it sounds more like a tool for their legal team than anything. This is kind of scarey. I know that a lot of companies count on their legal departments for an overall percentage of the company’s revenue, but announcing a tool like this is a clear message that the dogs are loose. Better watch out!
1) Your avg consumer has a hard time Xerox with the copier concept.
2) History repeating itself would be Microsoft, Yahoo or Apple nixxing a product that THEN goes to ‘G’ heights
The inventor of the Graphical User Interface now may re-invent the search… how ironic
Jon
WOW GREAT FIND - to see POWERSET is using XEROX /
- wonder if XEROX got 20-30% of them for lifetime licensing deal…
- if so - this would prove powerset - doesn’t have its own product / and everything Techcrunch has said - was just promoting a false front …
If its XEROX, it must be an innovation. After all, they invented the first PC, GUI etc..
Looks very interesting.