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Words Close Together Services
The services offered below are examples of the current capability of Words Close Together technology. Please get in touch with us, let us know your needs. We will ask for representative samples of your data in electronic form. Provided your data is in a form that we can handle, we will send without charge a WCT searchable index of a sample of your data. We will also provide an estimate of service costs on both a once-only and subscription basis. If you contract for our services, we will provide software (text extractors and formatters) tailored to your needs. Once all the preparation tools work smoothly, you can get quick turnaround for your indexing and search needs.
Archive search capability (publications, blogging, etc.)
"That was a great article that you wrote five or seven months back. How do I find it now?" If it was in a magazine, typically you need to know the date. If the article was in a blog, it has long since disappeared off the home page. Usually web sites offer only search of headings or key word indexes that force the searcher to try to think like the person who prepared the index. A better solution: Full text precision search with meaningful relevance ranking.
Copyright protected search of your reference works and text books
Copyright protected search makes sense when the user is expected to have a paper copy of the work on hand (reference work, journal, text book, magazine). A search yields headings and locations in the paper copy of the best hits. But the content itself is not shown.
Example: An association's parliamentarian at a meeting wants to find references in Robert's Rules of Order Newly Revised instantly. Thumbing the printed index at the back of the book and looking up index entries is too slow. Better solution: Perseus Press would provide a WCT electronic index as a companion or later add-on to its paper edition. The parliamentarian loads this index and the free WCT Reader (search engine) onto her laptop, and takes the laptop to the meeting. When a need arises, she searches the full text in the time it takes to type a few words (e.g., "call member* to order"). For the 10th edition, she sees that the best hit is on page 626 at line 20. She leafs to that page and is ready in well under 10 seconds to advise the Chair on procedure. The Parliamentarian looks good, the Chair proceeds on sound advice, the meeting goes smoothly.
Another example, this one needed ten thousand times a day: A student is cramming for a test and wants a quick review of a particular concept in the text book. Type two or three words, thumb to the best hit, check it out.
Copyright protected search keeps the publisher's content from being lifted or copied. The electronic supplement adds little cost, but greatly expands the user's access to content.
Full search of your reference works and text books
The marginal cost of the next copy of an electronic publication is tiny compared to that of a paper copy. This attractive aspect of going electronic is balanced against the profound nervousness of letting some audiences have full access to the content of a text or reference work. Yet there are situations in which full electronic text publication is warranted.
Example: For years I watched university-level text publishers pour tens of millions of dollars into printing and shipping desk copies to faculty members. They shipped, sometimes on spec, sometimes on the teacher's request, sometimes on text adoption. I became convinced that the first two (spec and on request) were far better served with an electronic copy. It is a relatively straight forward matter to add a time frame and password control. Put 50 texts on a DVD, ship the 12 grams of aluminized plastic to a broad selection of teachers, have publisher's college reps distribute passwords on an as-needed basis. There is more than printing and shipping cost savings at stake. Professors receive printed desk copies for free. I have watched professors of otherwise high integrity sell off the books to book resellers who haunt the campuses regularly. Those resold books wind up in student hands and undercut the primary sales into the student market. Electronic publication (with the power of Words Close Together search) would radically improve this scenario from the publisher's perspective.
Custom preparation and indexing of corporate data
You have data. You want insiders OR a select group of outside subscribers OR customers OR the general public to have access. Simply ask for a sample of Words Close Together indexing applied to your content. If you like the sample, we can make up a complete set which you can distribute access over your Intranet, the Internet, or via media such as CD-ROMs.
Creation of enhanced search for web sites
This is best shown by example. It's there at the top of this page. Try it. For example, enter the two words "and the" (without the quotation marks) and click the Search button.
Note: You may have guessed that custom services are our way of testing all our software against your real world needs. We want all software to be as failsafe as possible. Progressively the software underlying all custom services will be made available directly so that you can select, extract, prepare, and index text entirely in house. For now, please contact us.
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