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.

We are all familiar with Staples and their “easy” button. What a great commercial! It depicts office workers who are in dire office needs (file organization, inkjet cartridges, etc.)  and find refuge in this easy button. One press of the button and voila, problem is solved. Of course, this is too good to be true.

How does this relate to illumin8? In a previous post, we described an illumin8 user who was able to find a solution provider in 3 minutes using illumin8 compared to a year’s worth of searching using other search products. This user might very well describe illumin8 as an easy button. So the question…Is it possible to create a product where a simple click of the search button will yield the next ipod? Can illumin8 be the beginnings of this product?

It is very interesting that as soon as a search product is not free, folks expect miracles to happen. In many previous engagements, I’ve had the opportunity to help companies hunt for the next innovation holy grail whether it be a new kind of packaging material or miracle household cleaner. At the end of some of these hunts, the members of the project teams found themselves looking at each other trying to figure out what to do next. These project teams were suffering from the money button syndrome. They expected “the answer” to simply surface to the top. The really good project teams understood early on that they needed to ultimately make the necessary intermediate and final decisions. They recognized that the information coming back from our hunts was just the beginning.

It is also true that one searcher’s garbage is another searcher’s treasure. This is the same for search results. The exact same search and output could be interpreted in so many different ways depending on the searchers point of reference. Why do I bring this up? Although I work for a technology company that is building an “intelligent” search tool, the bottom line is we can only strive to bring a searcher the most relevant information out there. A search tool cannot make a partnership happen nor facilitate a licensing agreement - there is no money button, sorry.

It still takes people to make business happen. Search and relevant information can only help to speed up the process. In the case of our user finding solution provider, he had to make initial contact and get the ball rolling. Yes, obvious, but I still see a lot of reluctance here. I guess even with all the technology around us today, picking up the phone is still required.

So back to the money button. Unfortunately, illumin8 will never be the omnipotent search tool to end all search tools, but maybe we can move past the just calling illumin8 a search engine. How about “opportunity engine”? Here’s the opportunity button. Give it a push. If that doesn’t work, log into illumin8. Who knows, maybe you find the solution to world hunger.

For some fun summertime reading check out IDC’s white paper on the “Digital Universe” (http://www.emc.com/digital_universe). This vendor-sponsored study boldly estimates and forecasts what IDC calls “The Digital Universe” — essentially the total quantity of digital information created, captured and replicated worldwide. It is measured in exabytes (one exabyte= 1 billion gigabytes) and is forecast to grow rapidly, reaching 1,800 exabytes by 2011.The study notes that

The tools are in place–from Web 2.0 technologies and terabyte drives to unstructured data search software and the Semantic Web–to tame the digital universe and turn information growth into economic growth.

illumin8 is a good example of a tool designed exactly for this purpose: converting masses of raw content into business value. This is a critical task for those of us in the information industry and it’s not an easy one. As IDC notes: “searching for meaning in the content of unstructured data….is the rocket science of the digital universe”. We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

On July 7 we went live with our second major release this year! Kudos to the development team for once again delivering a major product enhancement release in an extremely compressed time frame. The highlight of the release is a new Result category: Authors and Inventors. Now, when you enter a search, we will display the leading authors and inventors drawn from our vast journal and patent content. Our customers have asked for this, and it is a great start on pinpointing experts associated with a query. With this addition, any illumin8 search will display an even more powerful overview covering technical approaches, companies, organizations, products and now, authors/inventors. Besides the author/inventor output, we’ve also made some significant usability improvements, including a redesigned tabbed profile view and a new, more informative welcome page.

Stay tuned: there will be more exciting product enhancements to come throughout the year.

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.

I’m a little behind with this post, but hopefully it will be worth it. More than 1,000 participants from around the globe converged on the San Jose Fairmont toting laptops, notebooks and, well, ontologies.Too bad I couldn’t get Occam’s razor through security (bad joke I know). Here are some quick highlights from what was a really interesting and even, at times, exciting show:

• The big buzz was around a “social interest” RDF enabled site, backed by Paul Allen, Vulcan Ventures, and currently in beta-invite only mode. It is called “twine”; the other milder buzz was around PowerSet (natural language search over Freebase and Wikipedia), which just launched.

• I could find no one offering a commercial product based on natural language processing (NLP) at internet scale. Nor could I find anyone offering semantic search with integrated premium scientific content. So illumin8 is currently unique in the industry, and our ability to apply our NLP engine over this vast content remains a very compelling differentiator.

• Google played the role of spoiler in the semantic party. It is skeptical of the semantic web, and very skeptical about the potential for semantic search on a global consumer scale. Yahoo, on the other hand, is a strong believer and they were pushing their Search Monkey platform very hard.

All in all, a very worthwhile show; I hope to be back next year.

They say a NY minute is fast, but it’s nothing compared to a combined NY/Silicon valley minute. Witness the i8 product development cycle. We launched the product at the end of February, and in slightly more than a month we had a major product release. This was the release which organized the solutions summary panel into neat categories. Our customers were really happy with this overview, but we’re just getting started. We’ve got more exciting enhancements coming throughout the summer and rest of the year! Stay tuned.

Hello and welcome to the illumin8 blog.

It’s all started in an Elsevier Library Connect meeting in October 2006. I was talking with one of our customers (3M) about the text mining initiatives within her company and she (unfortunately I can’t recall her name and I could not retrieve my archive emails now) mentioned that they had started using a company recently and they were very pleased from the results. She told me they were not like a regular text mining company but they are doing something very unique. So I asked the company name. The company’s name, “Accelovation” (since renamed to NetBase), did not ring a bell in my mind, and I was kind of upset that I hadn’t heard of them until that point in time.

In November, I sent an email to Michael Osofksy “to see if there is an opportunity between two companies.” Michael sent me an email stating that Jonathan Spier, NetBase co-founder, would get in touch me. And he did.

After a few phone calls and meetings in New York and Mountain View and some sushi and sake, we realized that, together, we had all of the ingredients to develop a very unique solution to bring our shared vision to life.

Almost five years ago Michael, who was doing his graduate studies at MIT, was meeting once a week with Jonathan, who was at Harvard, to discuss how the Internet could impact innovation and business. This was before blogging took off, before social networks, and the web was tiny, barely a few billion pages. They saw that the challenge for business research was going to be too much information, so they started NetBase.

At almost exactly the same time, at Hoboken we were exploring new ways to find insights from the trusted content sources we have at Elsevier and the web. We wanted to develop a new online solution that would help R&D knowledge workers in their technology intelligence activities, and find solutions to their critical R&D questions. (More on how we developed illumin8 with our development customers and our UCD team in a future post)

14 months (and lots more sake) later, and we are profoundly excited to be announcing illumin8

Our idea is to use this blog to update you on illumin8 and the research industry in general. Even better we would like to hear from you. Its been a long path from Hoboken and MIT to our illumin8 launch. We’re glad you are here for the next phase of the journey.

While Hollywood  is preparing for Oscars, we are preparing for our own celebration. Mountain View and New York have started the countdown for the launch of an  unique online research solution