Super Secret Stealth Engine ManagedQ Unveiled!
A secretive [I’ll say!] new player in Search has just decided to make itself [sort of] known to the world. Founded by a group of experienced [but anonymous] Silicon Valley entrepreneurs from Stanford, ManagedQ has developed a new search application that utilizes sophisticated NLP (Natural Language Processing) techniques to provide a powerful and innovative search experience.
I had the pleasure of personally meeting with some of the founders [no names] of ManagedQ last week and received a live demonstration of their technology. [That they never took off their sunglasses should have tipped me off.] Before getting into the product, they explained to me a bit of the thought process that went into creating ManagedQ. Specifically, they found three key elements that they believe are problematic with Search as it stands today.
1. Clicking on the results links is too time consuming and abrasive to do in every search.
2. Search should tell you about the important People, Places, and Things related to your query.
3. You should be able to instantly explore the search query results on the client-side.
ManagedQ has implemented these insights together with an interactive interface that is simple to use to create not just a search engine, but a new search application.
Rather than just spewing out a list of text results like those you would get from a major search engine, ManagedQ presents visual snapshots of the results pages overlaid with textual summaries. But these are not just static image previews, with ManagedQ you have the ability to intelligently explore your search results without ever leaving the results page.
To start, ManagedQ has implemented advanced NLP techniques to provide the most important People, Places, and Things related to your Search. For instance, if you search a band, you get its members, and if you search a company, you get its headquarters location. Called “Ideas”, they provide more than just a listing of topics related to your query - mousing over them displays each occurrence of the Idea (along with surrounding text) in each of the Results, instantly, something ManagedQ calls “Managed Summaries”.
But sometimes only you know what you’re looking for. That is why ManagedQ developed its “Find as You Type” capability. Start typing, and ManagedQ searches through the results as you type, highlighting full matches in dark yellow and partials in light. The searching is performed instantly. The NLP-driven Ideas and Find as You Type ability allow you to dig into the result set and get to the information you’re looking for. Best of all, there’s no need to click through a bunch of blue text links, never knowing which result will hold the answer you’re looking for.
If you ever need to see more of the context of the original page, one click takes you to a stripped-down version of the page without leaving the ManagedQ search page. A convenient link is provided to open up the result in a separate browser window as well.
As an added bonus for techies, ManagedQ supports the use of regular expressions. Used in the same way as their “Find as you Type” functionality, regular expressions in ManagedQ allow for complex, real-time pattern-matching across the entire result set. For instance, imagine being able to find all dollar amounts when searching for a product or all dates and years when performing research. The ManagedQ team has promised to package certain regular expressions into an easily accessible form for widespread use.
For the past 15 years, improvements in the Search Experience have consisted of little more than a dressing-up of the same old ten text results. With ManagedQ, from the moment you enter your Search query, everything is different.
In addition to the great NLP-generated Ideas and instant contextual Searching, ManagedQ has what they call a “modular back-end”. You see, rather than re-creating a Search engine from scratch, ManagedQ has created a Search Application that runs on top of traditional Search engine results. What this boils down to is that ManagedQ can be run on top of the results of any of the Alternative Search Engines, not just Google, enhancing their results with all of the features I’ve described above. One can easily envision a future wherein ManagedQ essentially serves as the (deep) front-end to a variety of Search engines, a one-stop-shop for Search.”
The ManagedQ team [whoever they are] has ensured me that this is just the beginning.
Stay tuned for more news on this new search application [but I may have to kill you!].
February 5th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
Seems pretty cool. Loads really slow with all the graphics though.
February 5th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
@Stephan
Hmmm that’s strange - it’s really fast for me - I”m using Safari on a Macbook over dsl. In general though, I really like it! I love the interface - much more fun to play with, and more useful, than Google! Consider me sold.
~ Kim
February 6th, 2008 at 10:52 am
This looks pretty neat and useful. My only concern would be a potential information overload, i.e. too much data on one screen. This is a common problem for any search engine trying to serve more than just small snippets of text, though.
February 12th, 2008 at 12:58 am
This product is great. It’s much more powerful and useful than using Google and is light years ahead of the alts. I like the “executive summaries” which seem to allow me to search both subject and peripheral topics at the same time. Also, the concept of the application/software on top of Google is far superior than trying to rebuild the engine, which is the core flaw of the alts. Google is the best place to start from. ManagedQ actually takes Google results up a level. I’m with Kim above.
February 15th, 2008 at 10:45 pm
This is by far one of the coolest search tools I’ve ever used because of the search within a search function. I have to do a lot of research papers and a lot of the times Google just doesn’t cut it. Managedq helped me cut out all the crap I usually get by letting me preview the pages and then cut it down even further for the information I need to write my paper.