We are occassionally asked “What is so special about illumin8?” Here’s an example of some of the magic operating behind the scenes of a typical illumin8 search. Suppose a researcher was investigating the problem of soil erosion. Entering the simple phrase soil erosion in our search box generates a powerful result set with summarized, organized information on relevant products, companies, organizations, authors, and approaches. Quite a bit can be gleaned from just this initial summary overview. And selecting one of the solutions, such as “grass”, lets us see a set of records discussing the use of grass to solve soil erosion. Seems simple, but there is more to this than meets the eye.

First, the user has only entered the phrase soil erosion in the search box (the word “grass” hasn’t been entered). Second, illumin8 automatically understands that soil erosion is a problem to be solved. It searches its database to find all instances where the phrase occurs in the correct problem context. It then finds entities connected with the problem, for example companies or organizations investigating solutions to soil erosion, approaches to solving soil erosion, etc. Finally it combines the results and places them in the proper category.

Let’s look at a record included in the grass solution.

This is a pretty straightforward semantic match with the query. What is even more interesting though, is that the system automatically finds synonyms to “grass” and fuses the records containing them under the “grass” solution. For example, records containing words like pasture, forage, and forage plants are all automatically discovered and included as part of the “grass” solution set. Here is an example:

I hope you can see the power of this technology. Typical search products would not pinpoint the search term in a specific, meaningful role, nor would they extract entities which connect to the term in an intelligent way. But that is what illumin8 does. And it goes further by summarizing, adding synonyms, etc., The benefit is a richer search which finds the right answers in the least amount of time.

I admit it. I use other non-illumin8 search engines everyday, but I have realized how search engines today have made us lazy as searchers. If I were to watch over your shoulder while you use your favorite search tool, I bet what I would see is the following:

1. Type in a few search terms
2. Scan through page 1 and 2
3. Type in a few different search terms
4. Scan through page 1 and 2
5. Repeat steps 3-4 again and again and again

My colleague Michael described this activity appropriately as ”hunt and peck.” I think you can get the visual. I will attribute the incredible speed of search today for this behavior. If searches took 5 minutes to complete, you would probably be more careful with your searches.

This actually reminded me of my introductory computer science class in college – a complete disaster, well almost. I did learn one valuable lesson I still keep with me today and it is this notion of “pseudo code”. In this class, you learn all the basic commands – if, else-if, if-then, if-then-else, etc. The whole idea is to sequence a set of these commands so that the sum of these commands will perform some kind of computation for you. This could be a computation such as alphabetically ordering a list of student names to finding the distance between two coordinates.

I decided to take the “hunt and peck” approach to this programming class. I would sit down and start writing a few commands, trying them out – didn’t work, change some code – didn’t work, you get the picture. I would find myself sitting for hours trying to debug why my program didn’t work properly. For the first few project, it wasn’t so bad, I was able to eventually figure out. I would submit my code on a disk (yes, on a disk) along with my pseudo-code. Apparently I was suppose to jot down some notes about my code before I actually wrote the code. This was supposedly a best practice. Eh, cool people weren’t doing that. I wrote my pseudo code after my program was finished, spilled some Coke over the notes, and gave it a good wrinkling to make it look like I actually wrote pseudo code.

It finally came down to a program that was just a killer. I remember it was something to the effect of writing a program to determine to most efficient route for a delivery truck. Sounds simple enough right? Oh no … OMG! After painstaking days of working on this dumb program, I finally gave into doing the other uncool thing – going to office hours the next day. So I go and show the graduate student instructor my code. He didn’t even bother and asked my for my pseudo code. My response – “Uh, I didn’t bring them with me…” For some reason, he didn’t believe me so we sat down and started writing pseudo code. By the end of the office hour, I was confident I would be able to tackle this program. A few hours later and voila.

So pseudo code and illumin8…

For folks who have never had a CS class, psuedo coding is the act of writing out your program on paper at a higher level without getting into the syntax detail. The idea is to help you organize your thoughts and find possible pitfalls before you actually encounter them so when you actually do sit down in front of your keyboard, it will be much smoother. I will attest to this practice.

I believe this lesson can be applied to search and illumin8. One of my favorite best practices is to advice users do pseudo code or in this case, let’s call it “pseudo search”. For example, in one of our illumin8 webinars, we described various approaches to identifying a Private Label service provider. Often, users just type “private label” as part of their search strategy and just give up there, but we have other options. Of course we will want to use “private label” as part of our search strategy and hope that these kinds service providers describes themselves in that way. But what about other ways to describe a Private Label provider? Another option to consider is to search on the services they provide such as “custom formulation” and “formulation flexibility”. If we can just pause for a few minutes to think about how we might enrich our search strategy (psudo-searching), I truly believe 99 out of 100 times, you will get better results.

Give pseudo searching a try and let me know how it goes.

Since launching illumin8 back in February, we’ve had a lot of memorable moments while making customer presentations. We have heard quotes like “this is amazing!” or “how did you do that?” or “i love this product”, but none was as rewarding as what happened last week. Right before we got into presenting illumin8 at a Fortune 100 company, a current illumin8 user at the company interrupts the meeting to let his colleagues know they should pay attention to the presentation. Why? Well, the fact that he spent a year looking for a solution provider that illumin8 was able to uncover in 3 minutes and are currently utilizing the solution provider’s services. Imagine his excitement…that’s awesome! Is this the result of every illumin8 search? Probably not and we can’t guarantee this result (nor can anybody actually in reality), but it is NICE when it happens.