By: Jason Lee Miller | Source: searchnewz.com

It’s so crazy it just might work: a live person, like your own personal attach to guide you through the maze and answer questions you don’t know how to ask a computer. That’s the idea behind ChaCha, a search engine founded from pure geek credibility, and hooks searchers up with paid "guides" to help them find what they’re looking for.

If you pay extra attention, you may be familiar with the founder. But more likely you’re familiar with what he’s done for your everyday life. Or maybe you don’t use voice mail or iTunes. Scott Jones has a plethora of titles, but he seems to prefer three: inventor, entrepreneur, pioneer. He has awards for being all three, and a patent list as long as your arm.

Jones put ChaCha forth in private testing this week, with plans to open it up in beta testing later this year. ChaCha puts humans into the game of search, earning $5-$10 an hour (in some cases up to $20) to be subject matter experts.

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By: Danny Wirken | Source: searchnewz.com

Search engines aim to provide the most relevant results in response to queries but limitations can be seen on what is actually returned based on the queries used.

Search queries can either be too specific or too general for search engines to recognize good results. Google has filed patent applications regarding alternative query terms or query refinements to offer a solution.

The Google Solution

Search queries that are not too effective in providing good results include homonyms which are words that have the same sound or spelling but different meanings. Improper contexts in the choice of words can also be very confusing especially to search engines. Very general terms provide results that are too broad while very narrow terms can be very restrictive and may provide non-responsive search results.

Multi-Stage Query Processing

The determination of page relevancy in responding to queries from searchers considers how a term or phrase is used in the context of a page. A patent application that looks into the possible ways of considering the context of these words was likewise submitted by Google. It describes a multi-stage process that determines relevancy and finds results to a search.

The possible actions to be taken as described in this document can be divided into stages. The first stage deals with deletion of stop words, term stemming and expansion of queries to use things like synonyms and related terms that commonly co-occur with them. During this stage, the relevancy scores are created between query and each document computed with one or more scoring algorithms. The second stage uses adjacency and proximity of terms to rank documents. The third stage reviews the term attributes such as determining whether terms are titles, headings, metadata or whether these terms possess certain font characteristics. The fourth and last stage is the generation of snippets to return with results.

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By: Jason Lee Miller | Source: webpronews.com

Blogging software and services company Six Apart announced today that it acquired Rojo Networks, the web-based news aggregator, for an undisclosed sum. A sale of majority interest in Rojo’s news reader services is expected in the coming months.

According to Liz Gannes at GigaOM, Rojo was struggling to raise funding and attract an online audience. In May, the online feed reader was pulling in only 100,000 visitors per month.

It appears though, that the technology and the talent behind it were of unique interest to SixApart. Rojo.com will stay online, according SixApart CEO Barak Berkowitz, who also plans to use Rojo code in other products.
Berkowitz will be taking on Rojo senior executives Chris Alden and Aaron Emigh at the company as executive vice president and general manager of Movable Type, and executive vice president and general manager of core technologies, respectively.

You may know both new SixApart executives from other venues. Alden is cofounder and CEO of Red Herring Communications, while Emigh was formerly the CEO of CommerceFlow.

"We are very pleased that Chris and Aaron are joining us," said Berkowitz. "They bring outstanding experience and knowledge that will benefit all of our users, including the millions of those using TypePad, LiveJournal and Vox."

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