Over a year ago a colleague introduced me to Intellext's Watson. Watson runs unobtrusively on my desktop and maintains a set of search results based on what I am reading and writing at the time. I set up Watson to use several search engines (my enterprise search, Google, desktop search, ... ) and Watson continually infers what I am in focused on and provides me with real-time research from all of the search engines I pointed it to.
There was some very clever UI design in Watson that made it easy to configure, unobtrusive, yet ever-present, The real secret sauce though, is in the inference engine that Jay and others developed at Northwestern University. It creates accurate searches based on where my focus is: an email, a presentation, a web page, whatever.
The folks at Intellext have now turned their attention to widgets. They have renamed their company MediaRiver and introduced a new platform called ClickSurge which supports widget development and execution. I spoke to Jay Budzik, MediaRiver's CTO, and he pointed me to a recent blog post on the new product. In Jay's words:
Well, as you may have noticed, we began to work more with media companies like AOL and Ziff Davis, to help deliver their content to people using custom versions of Watson that tied to specific information sources. It didn't take long for us to figure out we needed a solution for web sites ....
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We took the Watson Engine that ran as part of the desktop product, ported it to an ASP.NET web service, wrote some JavaScript that does some fancy remoting, tested and tuned our content analysis and query formation algorithms for social networks and blogs, and, voila, ClickSurge was born.
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Widget strategies help our customers (media companies) reach new audiences, because widgets tend to spread virally, out onto the "long tail." People copy and paste them onto their web pages and then their friends copy them onto their own pages and so on. This helps a company "stake out" virtual real estate out in the "wild wild west of the web" where it wouldn't be economical for them to go do a business development deal.
When we spoke last week, Jay summarized how the widgets work and laid out three main scenarios of use:
A web page loads with the ClickSurge widget and it infers a query based on the web page topic and contents. The widget also "understands" the layout of popular sites (like Blogger, Friendster, etc) which hones the search relevance. The widget sends the query to MediaRiver's servers which then forwards them to search engines or other sources. The widget displays the contextual results. The diagram provides more detail
Jay's three scenarios are:
Recirculation within a site. For example, Microsoft's Developer Network might place a widget on its support pages that automatically point out relevant product pages.
Content partnerships. Taking the MSDN example one step further, MSDN and CodeProject might use widgets to connect relevant articles between the sites.
Viral syndication.For example bloggers can take a widget and embed it in their own blogs, and link automatically to relevant information from other sources. Check out this widget on Making Sense of My World. It searches the Motley fool site based on the blogger's most recent post.
This is a logical, yet exciting, step for Intellext-MediaRiver. Their new platform adds high-value context to search based on the deliberate and viral adoption models that are driving excitement about widgets.
