Type "what Steve Jobs said yesterday" into the FactSpotter tool and the search software will hunt through documents and return a handful of relevant answers, instead of churning out countless articles containing the Apple CEO's name.
But the FactSpotter software, unveiled last week, will not be available to the public over the Internet or otherwise--only to customers of document management company Xerox, which developed the tool.
Jean-René Gain, director and general manager of marketing, strategy and alliances at Xerox, told Silicon.com that Xerox will not sell FactSpotter as a standalone application--only as an embedded application to its customers.
"We are not taking on Google with this," Gain said. "It is an aside option to consider, but we need this technology to differentiate ourselves" from competitors.
Mario Jarmasz, technology showroom engineer at Xerox, said: "This is completely different from searching on Google because we can drill down to certain levels of detail."
Xerox predicts the text-miner software will be useful in other situations where information must be retrieved from a massive database, including corporate and government searches, drug discovery, fraud detection and risk management.
Christopher Dance, laboratory manager at Xerox, told Silicon.com that FactSpotter could also be used to manage the vast number of documents produced during large mergers and acquisitions.
FactSpotter can hunt for relevant documents at a rate of 2,000 documents per second. Dance said the next stage of the development process will be to speed up the software.
The tool uses a linguistic engine that analyzes the meaning of words and the construction of phrases and sentences to work out exactly what a user is hunting for.
FactSpotter also recognizes concepts in a search term. To use the previous example, when a person types in "what Steve Jobs said yesterday," the tool will break down the sentence and recognize "Steve Jobs" as a person and "yesterday" as a time.
Xerox is "trying to make a computer understand text like a human being," said Frédérique Segond, parsing and semantics area manager at the company.
Segond added the FactSpotter tool is the next step for searching documents and uses "Web 3.0" technology that connects data, whereas Web 2.0 applications only collect data.
Artificial Intelligence is the direction many next generation search engines are taking and very rightly so.
While most would agree that Google has set the current standard for Web search, some technologists say even better tools are on the horizon thanks to advances in artificial intelligence.
Search is like oxygen for many people now, and considering Google's breakthroughs in Web document analysis, supercomputing and Internet advertising, it can be easy to think this is as good as it gets. But some entrepreneurs in artificial intelligence (AI) say that Google is not the end of history. Rather, its techniques are a baseline of where we're headed next.
Proponents of AI techniques say that one day people will be able to search for the plot of a novel, or list all the politicians who said something negative about the environment in the last five years, or find out where to buy an umbrella just spotted on the street. Techniques in AI such as natural language, object recognition and statistical machine learning will begin to stoke the imagination of Web searchers once again.
"This is the beginning for the Web being at work for you in a smart way, and taking on the tedious tasks for you," said Alain Rappaport, CEO and founder of Medstory, a search engine for medical information that went into public beta in July.
"The Web and the amount of information is growing at such a pace that it's an imperative to build an intelligent system that leverages knowledge and exploits it efficiently for people," he added.
Medstory is not alone. Other young companies such as stealth start-up Powerset and image specialist Riya are also looking to turn arcane computing techniques into business success stories.
Getting machines to think like us
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