Deep Web Technologies Blog » Marketing Announcements

Abe Lederman gets in the (mobile) groove

Sol — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 16:31:19 +0000

Abe Lederman, our founder and CEO, recently got a couple of exposures at MobileGroove, a site which provides analysis and commentary on mobile search, mobile advertising, and social media. The two MobileGroove articles cover Deep Web Technologies’ Biznar mobile federated search app.

Biznar is a free service, sponsored and provided by Deep Web Technologies, to business people everywhere. It uses an advanced form of federated search technology, enabling specialized access to more than 70 freely available deep web collections related to business.

The first of the MobileGroove articles is a review by Charles Knight who has made a reputation for himself seeking out and reviewing the “alternative” search engines, beyond Google, Yahoo!, and Bing.

The second article is a follow-on article in which MobileGroove founder and chief analyst, Peggy Anne Salz, in which she probes Abe about the company’s motivation for developing mobile apps.

Have your own experience of Biznar mobile. Check out the app at the iTunes Store.

The Charleston Advisor gives Deep Web Technologies high marks

Sol — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 03:53:56 +0000

The highly regarded Charleston Advisor, known for its “Critical reviews of Web products for Information Professionals,” has given Deep Web Technologies 4 3/8 of 5 possible stars for its Explorit federated search product. The individual scores forming the composite were:

Content: 4 1/2 stars
User Interface/Searchability: 4 1/2 stars
Pricing: 4 1/2 stars
Contract Options: 4 stars

The scores were assigned by two reviewers who played a key role in bringing Explorit to Stanford University:

Grace Baysinger, Head Librarian and Bibliographer at the Swain Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Library at Stanford University
Tom Cramer, Chief Technology Strategist at Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources

The review upon which the scores are based, is available at Stanford. (Click on the purl.stanford.edu link for access to the full text.) At just six pages, the review makes for a quick read. The first four pages describe the Explorit features, infrastructure and support, and makes the case for the partnership between Deep Web Technologies and Stanford University that led to the development of the locally branded xSearch federated search product. Pages five and six provide the reviewers’ critical evaluation of Explorit, references, and their bios.

Key points from the critical evaluation include:

“Compared to other federated search products, Stanford found that DWT offered the most compelling package of performance, features, and design.”
“While federated search engines’ performance is inherently limited by the performance of its target sites, DWT’s progressive delivery of results gives researchers near real-time response with the first set of results while the application assembles a complete set of hits from all sources.” More information about how near-real time response works is available at the Federated Search Blog.
Explorit was “the only service that included alerts, and the only service that allowed us to create customized “search engines” locally.
“DWT’s performance, good relevance ranking, and faceting capabilities are very helpful to users.”
“Because Abstracting and Indexing tools contain controlled vocabulary terms, when a user is searching xSearch, there are more discovery points than if they were searching Google Scholar or a publisher’s site.”

More observations are available in the review. More information about xSearch is available at Stanford. Our own press release about the review is available on our website. An Explorit overview is also available at our web-site.

On Our Way – Charleston, South Carolina

Darcy Pedersen — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 16:35:36 +0000

Deep Web Technologies’ President, Abe Lederman will be attending the 2011 Charleston Conference this year in…you guessed it… Charleston, South Carolina.

The annual Charleston Conference hosts a variety of appealing activities but before you do anything, please be sure to dig into your conference bag for your free copy of the Charleston Advisor. Inside you will find a spectacular review of Deep Web Technologies’ Federated Search (xSearch) at the Stanford Library. This review neatly summarizes the strengths of the application in four different categories: Content, User Interface/Searchability, Pricing and Contract Options. We can’t tell you the score here – you’ll need to read the article – but we were very pleased to see our composite score (although not surprised!).

We are also pleased to announce that our Partner, Swets, will present Swetswise Searcher, powered by Explorit, at the Vendor Showcase, Table #26. Abe will be around and will happily demonstrate the power of next-generation federated search.

We hope to see you there!

Reducing Research Time and Costs in the Corporate Environment

Brian Despain — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 20:58:53 +0000

One of the many unseen costs in corporations is the actual time spent doing research for the company. Researchers, product managers and scientists use a significant time researching a wide variety of sources to bring a new product to market. There are multiple costs in research. First, there is the cost of the research materials themselves, namely the journals and subscription content that every technology driven organization uses to keep ahead of developments in the field. Maximizing utilization of subscription content is important to an enterprise. No one wants to buy content and then have it sit in the equivalent of a digital closet because the interface is too hard to use or there are too many interfaces to search for multiple sources. Enterprises want to get the maximum value for their subscription dollar.

The cost of the content isn’t the only cost to be considered either. Research scientists are paid on average $84,000 annually. A principal research scientist earns on average $120,000. In organizations that are primarily research driven such as aerospace, semiconductors, chemical manufacturing, law and engineering, time spent in research is time not spent developing a product, improving a process or inventing the next great widget. Research needs to get done, and quickly, without any sacrifice on breadth or depth of research.

Federated search addresses these two cost areas of research while providing a third benefit to organizations. By providing a single point to searching hundreds of sources, researchers can issue a single search request through a simple Google-like interface and get thousands of results sorted by semantically related concepts. Compare this with issuing multiple, individual search requests, then collating the results across multiple applications, de-duping the results and then getting the full text; federated search speeds this process up with every source that a researcher needs. Furthermore federated search decreases the likelihood of missing an important document. By extending the search across multiple sources, you give researchers more time to go in depth into the results. This significantly cuts the time to result for a researcher to begin analysis and to do the real job he or she is paid to do – build that next generation product, improve that process or design that industrial process.

Deep Web Technologies Explorit is used by some of the world’s leading research organizations to speed research. Our corporate customers are world leaders such as Boeing in aerospace, Intel in semiconductors and BASF in chemicals. These organizations have chosen Explorit to provide a competitive advantage in today’s world. Isn’t it time your firm looked at improving it’s bottom line and competitiveness? If you are interested in reducing research time and research costs and improving the effectiveness of your knowledge enterprise, contact Brian Despain, VP of Sales, toll free: 866-388-1407 x235 or visit Deep Web Technology and click on the chat link during business hours.

WorldWideScience receives warm welcome at the UN

Sol — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 15:05:10 +0000

WorldWideScience is a global science gateway that combines national and international scientific databases into a search engine. From a single search form, a scientist, researcher, or curious citizen can search over fifty databases in English and now 22 multilingual sources (with translation to the searcher’s native language) and seven multimedia sources. WorldWideScience is the brainchild of the director of the DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), Dr. Walt Warnick. The gateway is maintained and hosted by OSTI and governed by the WorldWideScience Alliance.

Deep Web Technologies is proud to have developed the federated search technology behind WorldWideScience. And, with the cooperation of the Microsoft Translation services team, Deep Web Technologies also implemented the multilingual technology. It was a major undertaking but a worthwhile one for the science community, whose members can now greatly expand their reach to scientific papers in languages beyond their own.

Dr. Warnick was invited to deliver a presentation at the 14th session of the United Nations’ Commission on Science and Technology (CSTD). In a post at the OSTI Blog, Dr. Warnick shares the warm reception that WorldWideScience received.

I wish more of my OSTI colleagues could have been in Geneva to share the warm response from the attendees. Several country representatives offered up new sources for WorldWideScience (WWS). Another member of the audience searched mobile WWS for his own name and remarked that he found many of his papers. I received enthusiastic comments, so many that I couldn’t address all of them because of time constraints. Significantly, the Chair of CSTD volunteered to pay the costs of becoming a member of the WorldWideScience Alliance. There was great excitement about the possibilities for its use within the home countries of the attendees and how WWS advances the goals of CSTD.

The paper “Breaking down language barriers through multilingual federated search” co-authored by Abe Lederman (founder and president of Deep Web Technologies), and Dr. Warnick, Brian Hitson, and Lorrie Johnson from OSTI, explains the importance of the gateway:

“WorldWideScience.org (WWS) is a global science gateway developed by the US Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) in partnership with federated search vendor Deep Web Technologies. WWS provides a simultaneous live search of 69 databases from government and government-sanctioned organizations from 66 participating nations. The WWS portal plays a leading role in bringing together the world’s scientists to accelerate the discoveries needed to solve the planet’s most pressing problems. In this paper we present a brief history of the development of WWS and discuss how a new technology, multilingual federated search, greatly increases WWS’ ability to facilitate the advancement of science.”

Deep Web Technologies is delighted to be working with OSTI and other organizations to push the envelope of search technology and to make the world a smaller place.

Deep Web Technologies has a brand new look!

Darcy Pedersen — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 21:33:27 +0000

Our website has been upgraded with more information and less clutter. It’s a fresh, user-friendly experience that should help our visitors experience why Explorit is “state of the search.”

Some of our new pages include:

Please stop by for a visit and let us know what you think!

Brain Food– Are You Eating Healthy?

Nicholas — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 18:53:57 +0000

Our minds like to be fed with the best information possible! In the case of researchers (academic, medical, business, or others), their works depend on it. Here is a great blog post by Sol Lederman I would like to share. It’s on the topic of information quality vs. information coverage. It really illustrates the importance of search tools. I think use of “quantity” is important to note here. Quantity of information is not typically a bad thing– unless it’s a large amount of irrelevant results. If you would like to eat some brain food, Deep Web Tech is serving up a hot plate of your favorite info! Here are some sites you can feast on for a lifetime; bon appetit! Business, Medical, Science, and World Wide Science.

Sol Lederman wrote:

I recently discovered an article, 5 Reasons Not to Use Google First, that sings my song. The article addresses this question:

Google is fast, clean and returns more results than any other search engine, but does it really find the information students need for quality academic research? The answer is often ‘no’. “While simply typing words into Google will work for many tasks, academic research demands more.” (Searching for and finding new information – tools, strategies and techniques)

The next paragraph gave me a chuckle.

As far back as 2004, James Morris, Dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, coined the term “infobesity,” to describe “the outcome of Google-izing research: a junk-information diet, consisting of overwhelming amounts of low-quality material that is hard to digest and leads to research papers of equally low quality.” (Is Google enough? Comparison of an internet search engine with academic library resources.)

The article continues with its list of five good reasons to not use Google first.

Note that the recommendation isn’t to skip Google altogether. There’s a balance that’s needed to get the best value when performing research. The findings in the “Is Google enough?” article summarizes this point really well:

Google is superior for coverage and accessibility. Library systems are superior for quality of results. Precision is similar for both systems. Good coverage requires use of both, as both have many unique items. Improving the skills of the searcher is likely to give better results from the library systems, but not from Google.

Deep Web Tech in the News: WorldWideScience.org

Nicholas — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 16:13:30 +0000

Sometimes when I lie in bed with the dream of federating 1,000,000,000 sources dancing around in my mind, I often wonder, “What’s the best search engine?”. I suppose that depends on who (or what) you seek. The Internet is the largest collection of information that has ever been amassed, leading us to need better search engines.

I use Google a lot when I want to search for the answer to a simple question, a tasty recipe, or I want a good laugh (it gets me every time). I also find that using a wide variety of search tools is essential if you’re serious about getting the best possible search results. For all of the individuals out there that understand the need for specialized search engines, this next part will be a gem.

WorldWideScience.org, a premier scientific search engine has received some recent attention. Walter L. Warnick, Ph.D., Director of the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) for the U.S. Department of Energy, demonstrated WorldWideScience.org in front of multiple observers including those from the scientific community. According to openbiomed.info, “WorldWideScience.org is federated full-text, public, database of scientific and technical research information published from at least 70 cooperative countries”. With only about 4% duplication with general search engines (that means Google), WorldWideScience.org provides access to millions of deep web documents using a single, multi-language search query. One user wrote:

I decided to assess the biomedical research coverage by trying to find information on Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and procedures to isolate patients with this infection. I searched the keyword phrase “MRSA isolation protocol“: 892 documents were located, and when the result was sorted by date, open access resources such as the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), UK PubMed Central, and LENUS (Irish Health Repository) present very recent research. In comparison, the SCIRUS database searched for MRSA isolation protocol finds quantitatively more research, but when sorted by date, all of the recent literature identified is available in Science Direct via subscription-only access or for purchase US $ 31.50.

If you haven’t tried out the WorldWideScience, and you like having a mind-blowing amount of relevant information from all over the world at your finger tips, I suggest you give it a spin; you won’t be sorry you did. We understand the need for collecting information that’s not for answering the simple questions, or for cute cats (he is really cute though, check the laugh link above).

Still need convincing? Here is a simple demonstration and a shout-out to whomever made a pretty good video about a search engine, even with the 80′s cartoon-like sounds and “rad” guitar background music, I find it quite entertaining, there’s a special place in my heart for you.

Deep Web Tech in the News: Image Search

Nicholas — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 18:13:32 +0000

One small step for Science.gov, one giant leap for Federated Search.

“Science.gov is a gateway to more than 42 scientific databases and 200 million pages of science information with just one query, and is a gateway to more than 2,000 scientific websites from 18 organizations within 14 federal science agencies. These agencies represent 97% of the federal R&D budget. Science.gov is the USA.gov portal to science and the U.S. contribution to WorldWideScience.org. Science.gov is hosted by the Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information, within the Office of Science, and is supported by CENDI, an interagency working group of senior scientific and technical information managers.”

Science.gov received a pretty large upgrade in December, the image search is located under “special collections” and works just like science.gov except the results have thumbnails (www.science.gov/scigovimage/). The search query now quickly pulls back related images from multiple sources into a thumbnail size result. This is one of very few publicly available science image search portals. Cheryl LaGuardia, an industry critic, wrote:

For a free service this works mighty well: my test search for “tornedo” got the reply, “Did you mean “tornado”? with 151 results for the corrected spelling (a test, mind you, or perhaps I’m easing back into work slowly and may have inadvertently misspelled… no matter! The system works!). The resultant images are terrific, compelling enough to send Dorothy pedaling madly down the road away from them on her bicycle, with Toto in tow.

Deep Web Technologies powers the entire website, and we look forward to using this innovation on other projects in the future.

Deep Web Tech is Back in the Air

Nicholas — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 16:56:00 +0000

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s an over-used intro!

We wanted to let all of our readers know that we will be attending the ALA 2011 Midwinter Meeting, January 7-11. The Midwinter Meeting is in sunny San Diego, CA at the San Diego Convention Center. Our President Abe Lederman said, “We will be meeting with some of our current and potential partners to have an opportunity to integrate our organizational mobility, the ALA Midwinter convention is a great way see new and old faces as well as project us into the new year.”

The line-up of benefits include: 200+ discussion groups covering a variety of hot topics, 2000+ committee meetings and events, entrance to the exhibits, including the opening reception, the ALA President’s Program, ALA/ERT/Booklist Author Forum, Arthur Curley Memorial Lecture**, and the Sunrise Speaker Series. Needless to say, we will be quite busy for those days. The partners that we plan to meet with include Basch, Sweats, and two other recent partnerships we will be announcing after the New Year.

If anyone would like a face-to-face meeting, please contact us, we would love to arrange an engagement.

See you there!

**Arthur Curley served as president of the American Library Association in 1994-1995 and was director of the Boston Public Library. He was a champion of the arts and of the library’s role as a center that can transform the community. The lecture series commemorates his lifelong dedication to the principles of intellectual freedom and free public access to information. Mr. Curley was an ALA member for more than 30 years.