IBM Working On Google On Steroids
from the everyone-wants-the-Google-killer dept
Near the end of this Forbes article on how IBM's research group is building technologies for companies, and then licensing the intellectual property off, is a short description of a product they developed called Web Fountain, which is described as Google on steroids. IBM says they originally developed it for a record company (unnamed), and it's special feature appears to be its ability to search chat rooms as well as the rest of the web. The record company used it to predict sales of certain albums - so, if there was a lot of "buzz" in the chat rooms about a certain musician, they could safely assume it was going to be a hot seller. Now, they're looking to take that technology and do something more with it - licensing off pieces to other companies to use. So, while all the focus in search (so far) has been on Google vs. Yahoo vs. Microsoft, perhaps people should take a look at IBM. Of course, over the past few years there have been plenty of stories of new search technologies that were "better than Google", and none have really lived up to their hype. So, it may be a little early to crown IBM as search king.
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IBM Working On Google On Steroids
If you watch the National Film Board of Canada documentary "Dream Machine," it is mentioned as one of their tactics. Sony fabricates then monitors "the buzz" around an artist in chat groups and newsgroups.
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