Archive for February, 2012

Mattias Ellison

Findability, our holistic approach to implementing search technology

February 24 - 2012 | Mattias Ellison

We are proud to present the first video on our new Vimeo channel. Enjoy!

Successful search project does not only involve technology and having the most skilled developers, it is not enough. To utilise the full potential and receive return on search technology investments there are five main dimensions (or perspectives) that all need to be in focus when developing search solutions, and that require additional competencies to be involved.

This holistic approach to implementing search technology we call Findability by Findwise.

Paula Petcu

Searching for Zebras: Doing More with Less

February 15 - 2012 | Paula Petcu

There is a very controversial and highly cited 2006 British Medical Journal (BMJ) article called “Googling for a diagnosis – use of Google as a diagnostic aid: internet based study” which concludes that, for difficult medical diagnostic cases, it is often useful to use Google Search as a tool for finding a diagnosis. Difficult medical cases are often represented by rare diseases, which are diseases with a very low prevalence.

The authors use 26 diagnostic cases published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in order to compile a short list of symptoms describing each patient case, and use those keywords as queries for Google. The authors, blinded to the correct disease (a rare diseases in 85% of the cases), select the most ‘prominent’ diagnosis that fits each case. In 58% of the cases they succeed in finding the correct diagnosis.

Several other articles also point to Google as a tool often used by clinicians when searching for medical diagnoses.

But is that so convenient, is that enough, or can this process be easily improved? Indeed, two major advantages for Google are the clinicians’ familiarity with it, and its fresh and extensive index. But how would a vertical search engine with focused and curated content compare to Google when given the task of finding the correct diagnosis for a difficult case?

Well, take an open-source search engine such as Indri, index around 30,000 freely available medical articles describing rare or genetic diseases, use an off-the-shelf retrieval model, and there you have Zebra. In medicine, the term “zebra” is a slang for a surprising diagnosis. In comparison with a search on Google, which often returns results that point to unverified content from blogs or content aggregators, the documents from this vertical search engine are crawled from 10 web resources containing only rare and genetic disease articles, and which are mostly maintained by medical professionals or patient organizations.

Evaluating on a set of 56 queries extracted in a similar manner to the one described above, Zebra easily beats Google. Zebra finds the correct diagnosis in top 20 results in 68% of the cases, while Google succeeds in 32% of them. And this is only the performance of the Zebra with the baseline relevance model — imagine how much more could be done (for example, displaying results as a network of diseases, clustering or even ranking by diseases, or automatic extraction and translation of electronic health record data).

Caroline Abrahamsson

Search in the Digital Workplace

February 9 - 2012 | Caroline Abrahamsson

Last week we (Caroline Abrahamsson and Kristian Norling) had the opportunity to act as moderators for a conference on the Digital Workplace in Stockholm. Amongst the many good presentations, the keynote by Jane McConell was a gem. The Digital Workplace Trends report by Jane gives many insights into the intranet world, or as Jane and many others prefer to call it, the Digital Workplace (Participants in the survey receives a free copy of the report, highly recommended!). One of  the most interesting parts for us was the four different future scenarios that Jane described during her session and that the survey participants had voted on (on a scale with low, medium or high business value):

  • “My apps” – The intranet is a set of highly customized apps. People select what they need to do their jobs and build their own “intranet” like on an iPad.
  • “Smartsystems”-The userexperience is efficient and relevant because information is delivered in meaningful ways based on past behavior and context.
  • “People-centric” – Social networking, social tagging, location awareness, presence indicators and other technologies are integrated into processes and how people work daily.
  • “Super search” – Various search technologies come together to offer people greater relevance and control over vast amounts of information from inside and outside the enterprise.

p. 19 Digital Workplace Trends 2012

When Jane asked the audience at the conference if they thought Super Search had “high potential value”, a whopping 100% answered yes! In the Digital Workplace Trends report 70% of the participants considered Super Search to have a “high potential value”, and 20% of the leadership group has started implementing it.

The Digital Workplace: Redefining Productivity in the Information Age by  Infocentric Research is another excellent (and free) source on the current state of the Digital Workplace. Also in this report good search is mentioned as very important for getting work done in the digital workplace:

“Imagine that each and every employee in your organization would spend 1 to 2 full working hours per day surfing the web and social media sites (such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter) purely for private pleasure. Would that be acceptable for you? And even more important: would it leave your bottom line results unaffected?

The answer to both questions of course is clear “No”. But the bad news is that your employees spend just that amount of time for something even worse. And they do so with full allowance by management and in accordance to accepted work practices in your organization. What they do, what you do as well, is looking for information they need to do their job and ineffectively working with that information.”

p. 4 The Digital Workplace: Redefining Productivity in the Information Age

When reading these excellent reports it is quite obvious to us that the need for a “Super Search”, i.e. an Enterprise Search solution that can reach all types of information, is very much in demand. Many organizations have worked extensively with search for many years understand that this is actually a never-ending task. But search is still a very cost-effective and hands-on solution for many information and knowledge intensive tasks.

“Information based work is driven and determined by having the right information to perform the task at hand. For this, the information has to be there when needed. Looking for the right information to do something therefore constitutes one of the most relevant of all tasks. In fact, “searching” in all its forms is the most ubiquitous activity that information workers perform in their jobs”.

p. 15 The Digital Workplace: Redefining Productivity in the Information Age

To conclude, the new digital workplace in transforming the way we work, interact and communicate. The discussions during the conference showed that almost all organizations were in a transformation phase where the traditional intranet (with static pages updated by editors) is being complemented (and in some cases replaced altoghether) with collaboration areas and flexible worktools.  We look forward to this years development and hope to share some good cases with you, especially with regard to search, collaboration and mobility..

More reading on the Digital Workplace

Intranet Pioneer Mark Morell

Connaxions / Martin Risgaard 

The Intranet Benchmarking Forum

Pawel Wroblewski

Search Stuffed up with GIS

February 3 - 2012 | Pawel Wroblewski

When I browsed through marketing brochures of GIS (Geographic Information System) vendors I noticed that the message is quite similar to search analytics. It refers in general to integration of various separate sources into analysis based on geo-visualizations. I have recently seen quite nice and powerful combination of search and GIS technologies and so I would like to describe it a little bit. Let us start from the basic things.

Search result visualization

It is quite obvious to use a map instead of simple list of results to visualize what was returned for an entered query. This technique is frequently used for plenty of online search applications especially in directory services like yellow pages or real estate web sites. The list of things that are required to do this is pretty short:

- geoloalization of items  – it means to assign accurate geo coordinates to location names, addresses, zip codes or whatever expected to be shown in the map; geo localization services are given more less for free by Google or Bing maps.

- backgroud map – this is necessity and also given by Google or Bing; there are also plenty of vendors for more specialized mapping applications

- returned results with geo-coordinates  as metadata – to put them in the map

Normally this kind of basic GIS visualisation delivers basic map operations like zooming, panning, different views and additionally some more data like traffic, parks, shops etc. Results are usually pins [Bing] or drops [Google].

Querying / filtering with the map

The step further of integration between search and GIS would be utilizing the map as a tool for definition of search query. One way is to create area of interest that could be drawn in the map as circle, rectangle or polygon. In simple way it could be just the current window view on the map as the area of query. In such an approach full text query is refined to include only results belonging to area defined.

Apart from map all other query refinement tools should be available as well, like date-time sliders or any kind of navigation and fielded queries.

Simple geo-spatial analysis

Sometimes it is important to sort query results by distance from a reference point in order to see all the nearest Chinese restaurant in the neighborhood.  I would also categorize as simple geo-spatial analysis grouping of search result into a GIS layers like e.g. density heatmap, hot spots using geographical and other information stored in results metadata etc.

Advanced geo-spatial analysis

More advance query definition and refinement would involve geo-spatial computations. Basing on real needs it could be possible for example to refine search results by an area of sight line from a picked reference point or select filtering areas like those inside specific borders of cities, districts, countries etc.

So the idea is to use relevant output from advanced GIS analysis as an input for query refinement. In this way all the power of GIS can be used to get to the unstructured data through a search process.

What kind of applications do you think could get advantage of search stuffed with really advanced GIS? Looking forward to your comments on this post.