Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media

Ask Innovates Search UI

Briefly, I've been playing with Ask's experimental new search interface currently called 'AskX'. Read/Write Web has plenty of information (though the interface has changed a little since that post was published). Innovation in the search interface is something I'm really interested in. Microsoft, with its Live branded image search has already been exploring this area and Ask appears to take things to the next level.

There are two fundamental areas of innovation in search - the back end, which Powerset is disrupting with its NLP technology, and the UI which companies like Ask are disrupting. The search giant Google, on the other hand, isn't innovating in either of these spaces, opting rather for a new application a week path.

Ask: Smart RSS

I've been chatting with Gary Price, Director of Online Information Resources at Ask, and the author of Resource Shelf. He's been giving me some really interesting pointers to features in Ask as well as some other great data/research services not associated with Ask. When I left for vacation, I had a long list of to-be-blogged items from Gary and now I'm starting to get in to them.

Smart RSS is a feature that highlights Blog content in search results. More about the service can be found here. Gary originally contacted me as this blog is now included in that service. Now, if you search for "data mining" you will see included in the results a couple of posts from this blog. Thanks Gary!

Ask Me Again

It's been a while since I used Ask.com as a search tool. I've just been looking at the current interface - lots of neat features. Two that I like: the expand/narrow search capacity, which brings in something similar in feel to Vivisimo's clustering, but with simple key phrases; the second cool feature is the dynamic previews of search results pages - just move the mouse over the binoculars icon to see a thumbnail of the page linked to. The previews are not totally up to date, but definitely an interesting feature.