<$BlogRSDUrl$> Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant
Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant
Internet Happenings, Events and Sources


Friday, March 19, 2004  

WebFountain Takes Search To a Higher Plane
http://battellemedia.com/archives/000428.php#more

Tucked away at IBM’s remote Almaden research campus, researchers with alarmingly sophisticated PhDs are refining WebFountain, an analytics engine with search capabilities well beyond anything available on the public Web today. WebFountain came about, writes John Battelle, "because IBM noticed that large companies were drowning in information, that broad search engines like Google were not providing relief, and that corporate IT departments at large companies were trying to invent a new kind of mousetrap… Enter IBM. WebFountain is a classic IBM solution to the search problem. Instead of focusing on the consumer market and serving hundreds of millions of users/searches a day, WebFountain is a platform -- middleware, in essence -- around which large corporate clients connect, query and develop applications. It serves a tiny fraction of the queries Google does, but my, the queries it serves can be mighty interesting… A user could, for example, search for ‘all the places on the Web where 'The Passion of the Christ' is discussed that also mentions one of the top five box office movies that is not 'Lord of the Rings,' and throw out all sites that either are in Spanish, or are in the Southern hemisphere. Oh, and translate the ones that are not in English when you return results.'" Built on 256 dual-processor blades, WebFountain's throughput puts it in the top 50 supercomputers on earth, capable of scarfing up, tagging and re-tagging the entire Internet in less than 24 hours. With the corporate information marketplace currently at $18 billion a year, WebFountain may help IBM not only redefine it, but ultimately own it. [John Battelle's Searchblog 8 Mar 2004]

posted by Marcus Zillman | 4:20 AM
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