MEDIA AND PUBLISHING

Media and Publishing markets have trafficked in unstructured information since the Middle Ages. While many publishers offer access to highly-specialized, structured databases, they find the bulk of their customers rely on news, technical information, and subject matter expertise coming from a variety of unstructured sources.

The opportunity many are finding is that their customers want – and will pay for – greater, more specific access to this information. To provide their highly-desirable information in an immediate, searchable format, publishers are turning to Content Analyst for an innovative, natural-language search paradigm that is ideally suited to their enormous volumes of unstructured information.

Media and Publishing customers use our search products – as well as extensions – to create these compelling new offerings.

“Search on Steroids” – How it Works

Content Analyst’s powerful search software goes beyond the simple keyword and Boolean logic searches that power most search solutions. Instead, our software is already trained to search out and identify concepts and relationships as it performs its indexing function. The more documents that Content Analyst reads, the more it actually learns - obscure facts, concepts, and current issues become “fleshed out” as the software reads more and more relevant documents.

Content Analyst turns these concepts and relationships into mathematical expressions – after all, language is mathematic in nature. By using the power of mathematics, Content Analyst can quickly search for related concepts, ideas, and context based on a sentence, a phrase, or even a whole paragraph.

“Search on Steroids” – How it delivers Value

Simple keyword search is fine for the lay person – companies like Google have become industry giants, and technical people often turn to the free-market search engines for data.

Publishers, however, have vast stores of information that are not in the public domain – Google and the like would never find them. Publishers also find that their clients perceive the value of their information in two ways: the ease with which they can find information, and the actual information itself. Despite having the best information in his or her market, the Publisher has found that "ease of access" is as big of a buying criteria as accuracy and depth.

Content Analyst is an ideal remedy for this situation. Technical searchers often want very specific information – one or two keywords may not suffice. They are also often looking for correlating information – meaning the concept or notion they are researching may span different publications, formats, and nomenclatures. Since Content Analyst understands concepts instead of mere keywords, these associations are readily made – and delivered to clients at the click of a mouse button.

Extensions to Search – How Publishers find greater Value

This was one of Content Analyst’s first commercial markets. Our early publisher customers had very specific product objectives, and we turned the Content Analyst engine into a powerful, intuitive information guide.

One such product was developed to “learn” from both the client and the information being processed. Clients would subscribe to this news service, and set-up their preferences: what they wanted to see, which publications they wanted to see it from, and how specific their information requests were. As information and articles were delivered, customers could easily tailor their preferences, from simple “more articles like this” to “add this concept to my search list.” Over time, each client developed his or her own search paradigm, vastly different from each other.

Cross-Lingual Search, whose roots lie in the intelligence community, was also found to be a valuable feature for media searches. Often, obscure technical information was available only in a specific language. While the information was usually discernable even to an English-only speaker, finding it was a different story. Content Analyst was employed to search across different languages for appropriate information, revealing technical details that were hitherto inaccessible to those clients.