Search Wikia Finds a Friend in Intellisophic
Search Wikia Finds a Friend in Intellisophic
August 6, 2007: After it’s purchase and open-sourcing of the LookSmart’s Grub indexing service last week, Wikia has taken another step forward with its potential challenge to Google’s search prowess by convincing Intellisophic to open source its categorisation software alongside the Search Wikia project.
Intellisophic’s text categorisation software organises information based on concepts, increasing search accuracy through an understanding of vocabulary and the relationships between subject terminology. The company claims that by and grouping categories together, keyword searches can be dramatically improved.
“The Intellisophic text categorisation technology is a very important addition to the open source search community,” said Jeremie Miller, a lead developer in the Search Wikia effort. “Having advanced data mining technologies available openly for advancing search, combined with Grub and other contributions in the coming months, we are looking to revolutionise the space from the ground up for the first time since Google launched ten years ago.”
Whether or not it will be able to pose any real threat to the Google behemoth is yet to be seen, however, the project is gaining momentum and as evidenced by this new deal with Intellisophic - an increasingly broad and interesting range of support.
Search Wikia is aiming to make search more transparent and better for all through open collaboration. To this end, Intellisophic has agreed to open source its engine and make it available for any search application built using Wikia’s search tools.
“The Web is an amazing collection of human knowledge, unfortunately it is unorganized, and that can lead to frustration for businesses, researchers, students, etc.,” said Michael Hoey, chief executive officer, Intellisophic. “We believe everyone will benefit from the availability of more robust tools and share Wikia’s vision that search, and the entire web experience, can be improved through collaboration.”
Comment on this story