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Overview
"The View From 30,000 Feet"
WordsCloseTogether.com is releasing in stages a text search engine, together with all the software needed so that anyone who wishes may prepare / index / share / publish any quantity of text content, so that any target audience may easily find meaningful results.
This technology is offered as an alternative to the well known search engines, in the belief that some users might prefer Words Close Together relevance ranking. Our method takes into account a simple fact about language. Ideas are expressed in words. When the words you search for are widely scattered -- maybe paragraphs apart -- they are not related to the idea you are after. It is worse than useless for a search engine to offer results in which the desired words are far apart; you are left to dig through irrelevant results to get at what you are after. Our technology filters out the words-far-apart results. Words Close Together presents only the results in which the words you ask for are close together, and it ranks the results so that the closer the words are together, the nearer a result is to the top of the list. This form of relevance ranking makes it very likely that the results at the top are meaningful and that they relate directly to the idea you have in mind.
As of early 2008, over 14,000 examples of the first stage have been released so that people may experience this alternative search both on personal computers and over the Internet.
A fundamental value underlying this project is respect for people -- a belief that it is okay to give the user control of the search experience, to be transparent about relevance ranking (the basis for the order in which results are presented), and to treat users as something more than eyeballs for ads.
Words Close Together resolves a technical problem that for decades has troubled the computer industry's attempts to deal with whether words are near one another in text. The standard method has been to open up every search result that contains the desired words, then check how close the words are within that result. The standard method multiplied the search effort by a factor of tens of thousands or more. This problem has been creatively solved; such waste of user's time is no longer necessary. Proximity-based meaningful results can be delivered with extraordinary speed.
The patent for this new technology has been pending since March 8, 2004. (See U.S. Patent Application 20050198070 at www.uspto.gov.) One hopes that you find each successive release worth waiting for, and that you catch on to the power and the beauty of what has already been released. May you find it a delightful alternative among text search engines!
Douglas Lowry, Ph.D.
Professor of Business and Marketing (ret.), Franciscan University
and President, Marpex Inc.
Steubenville, Ohio
dlowry@alum.mit.edu
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| words close together.com | The "Research Quality" Search Engine by Marpex, Inc. | ||||