The Power of Search

Teragram offers practical insights into the usefulness of the search interface

by Demir Barlas, Line56. Posted June 28, 2006 at www.line56.com

Enterprise search is a far cry from consumer search. However, unless you use enterprise search regularly, you may not be aware of its remarkable power.

I was recently given a demonstration of advanced enterprise search technology from vendor Teragram, which claims to be the first company to have extended search into the full spectrum of structured and unstructured documents both inside and outside the enterprise.

The demonstration, led by Teragram President Yves Schabes, was simple. Schabes opened up a search box and typed in a number of queries. Here is what I saw:

Yves Schabes title: Note that this query wasn't in the form of a question, but Teragram's system answered it as one. Under the "answer" box, it returned the result: "Yes Schabes, President." Below that were a bunch of document-based hits in which those terms appeared.

2005 income: The query returned the answer "$35 million."

Weather forecast, Ithaca, NY: This query triggered Web services that went outside the enterprise (in this case, to a weather service) and returned weather forecast information for central New York state.

Overall, the demonstration was powerful because it showed how enterprise search can be an even faster and simpler interface (than, say, the dashboard) for connecting human users with certain kinds of information.

Granted, Teragram's solution isn't for everyone. It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and is being targeted mainly at online portals (AOL is a customer, for example), the defense industry (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, is another customer), and large enterprises (including Boeing). The segmentation makes sense because the usefulness of Teragram's enterprise search scales with the amount of information with which your organization is confronted.

That said, it was impressive to see a search box comb through back-end databases, data warehouses, applications, and even public Web services to find the answers to what the user doesn't even have to phrase as complete questions.

Plus, Teragram's technology doesn't just stop at finding information. It is also good at, as Schabes wrote in a DARPA solicitation, "detecting misleading information in vast amount of open sources including large amounts of textual information as found on the web." In other words, the technology can be applied to fraud detection, military intelligence, and general corporate data collections contexts.

About Teragram
Teragram Corporation is the market leader in multilingual natural language processing technologies that use the meaning of text to distill relevant information from vast amounts of data. Founded in 1997 by innovators in the field of computational linguistics, Teragram alone offers the speed, accuracy and global language support that customers and partners demand to retrieve and organize growing volumes of digital information. Teragram helps customers perform more efficient searches and better organize information in more than 30 languages, enabling them to reach new markets and make better decisions. Teragram serves customers across the publishing, pharmaceutical, telecommunications and financial industries, including AOL, Ariba, Ask Jeeves, Associated Press, CNN, Factiva, FAST Search & Transfer, Forbes.com, InfoSpace, Kofax, Naval Post Graduate School, NYTimes Digital, OneSource, Reed Business Information, Ricoh, Sony, Verity, WashingtonPost.com, the World Bank, and Yahoo. For more information please contact 1-617-576-6800 or visit http://www.teragram.com/info.