ePrecis, A Better Search Engine Than Google?

In the April edition of Twin Cities Business is a story on page 42 titled “The Google Stalker”. Unfortunately Twin Cities Business does not post their content online or I would link it here.

   

This is a story of a Minnesota man named Arnie Schultz and it starts in the 1960’s at the University of Minnesota where he was a student. He got a job at the medical school to “electronically index complex medical abstracts alphabetically and by category.”

   

This was his entry into a lifetime of “assigning numerical weight to every word in the English language in order to perform more useful, contextually correct electronic text searches and summaries.”

   

This work has resulted in a software program and now search engine called ePrecis.

   

The article goes into how the software works but essentially instead of searching for words or phrases words are assigned numerical weight and context. It’s much more complicated than that, I really wish this article were online, as I cannot adequately describe how it works.

   

ePrecis was written about in a post on ZDNet ePrecis - next generation search and at Online Marketing Blog, ePrecis an impressive search tool.

   

A group of Minnesota investors at a local incubator ZH Computer own ePrecis. According to the article ZH Computer is in discussions with Google, Microsoft, IBM, Yahoo, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and West Publishing to work on licensing agreements.

   

I am going to send this post on to my friends at Recruiting.com. I started using this instead of Google last week as I have found long word searches are more reliable than on Google. I am curious what my colleagues think.

Comments

[Jon]

Google stalking is rather dangerous because lots of people have the same name. You're likely to uncover something about a completely different person and not know which is which.

[Jim Durbin]

hmm - it's not bad, but I'm really loving TalkDigger. ePrecis wasn't turning out the results I was looking for - but that could be because our search strings are different.

I'll give it some more tries - and maybe ylu can arrange an interview we can put up on Recruiting.com?

Can you use your magic recruiting skills to get me an e-mail address?

[Ward Johnson]

Paul,

You ran this item April, 2006.

We subsequently got shot down by Google.

After regrouping, on February 14 we will announce a follow-on product called iReader.com

Are you interested in getting an advanced copy?

Best regards

Ward Johnson
iReader.com (not yet available as that name!)
952-921-9368 x115 Minneapolis