Demo 2006: Advancing search--Nexidia, Transparansee, Kosmix, Truveo
Demo 2006: On this second day of Demo, some search technology startups took the stage. Nexidia, an established company in search and speech analysis, introduced Nexidia Developer Edition, which lets rich media (video and audio) content creators and sites add phonetic search capablities for desktop and Web search. The software includes Web services for audio indexing and search, which makes it easy to integrate phonetic search with applications. Drew Lanham, senior vice president of media at Nexidia, showed impressive demos--fast and relevant results--of finding speech content in videos and podcast indexes.
Factoids: According to Nexidia's Web site, phonetic search is based on the notion that the entire world of utterances consists of about 400 phonemes. Most languages have a 40 phoneme range, and the most widely spoken languages an 80 phoneme range.
Cosmix demoed Kosmix Search, which takes an algorithmic approach to categorizing the Web, providing a multi-dimensional view of search results. The company founders, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, were also behind Junglee, database technology that was acquired by Amazon in 1998. Kosmix includes Health (beta), Travel (alpha), and Politics (alpha) search Unlike Healthline, which searches a constrained set of sites, Kosmix Health searches the entire Web, Rajaraman told me. Kosmix Health Search technology has a deal to power search on The HealthCentral Network.
Transparansee Systems showed the latest version of its Discovery Search Engine, which focuses on searching structured data. For example, in searching a real estate database, you set criteria in a database query and get the exact matches. Transparansee provides more flexibility in searching by including close matches and sliders that allow users to weight various parameters, such as number of bedrooms, price or zip codes. The end result is a more dynamic interactive search experience, which is a step forward compared to most searching today.
Truveo, part of AOL since January, showed its video crawler, which will be part of AOL Video Search in the next few weeks, according to Tim Tuttle, co-founder of the company. Visual crawling technology finds and indexes video that isn't found in other search engines, Tuttle said. For example, Truveo collects metadata associated with video content. He added that video search is just at the beginning and teased a new AOL product--AOL Video shown on a TV though Intel Viiv technology (introduced at CES in January). Not much new, but Tim Tuttle is no longer captain of a little startup.