Archive for the ‘Whozat’ Category

Investor sextuples investment in abInventio

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

One of our early investors was happy enough with what we are doing that he sextupled his investment in the abInventio fund. Thanks!

Whozat now allows you to browse people’s profiles

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

Simply click on the more… link on the home page to browse people, sorted by search popularity.

Whozat’s relevance ranking makes a difference

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

It’s not enough to be a semantic engine that understands the meaning of queries. Whozat also ranks search results for their relevance to the query. Say you’re searching for the American Automobile Association.  A semantic engine without relevance ranking returns a Wikipedia article about the AAA as its top result. The AAA’s site is not among the top 20 results at all. Whozat, in contrast, returns the AAA’s website as #1 –in addition to a Wikipedia article about it.

Whozat fully Chrome compatible

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008

My Chrome installation failed, but those who managed to get Google’s new Chrome browser to work on their machines said Whozat worked flawlessly with it.

–Alex

A video from a Whozat fan

Thursday, August 21st, 2008

You don’t want to miss this ode to Whozat from an ardent fan with a sweet voice, a catchy tune and a winning smile.

Whozat wins again

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

Looked for the name of the investment banker who sold Powerset yesterday. Whozat yielded his name on the first page of search results. Neither Google nor Powerset did –you’d think someone at Powerset would have written a Wikipedia article about him after the $100MM price tag he got them.

–Alex

google-serp-for-investment-banker-who-sold-powerset.jpgpowerset-serp-for-investment-banker-who-sold-powerset.jpg

The primitive state of search

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

My friend Philippe kindly alerted me to the fact that Argentina would play Brazil in the Olympics soccer semifinal yesterday. So I did a whole bunch of web searches to try to find out if it was being shown anywhere in L.A., in which channel and when. The searches were fruitless –every search engine I tried gave no good results. Then when the game was over, I tried to find a video of it online. After looking through lots of “top-ranked” videos on the topic, I found none. Still a lot of work left to do in search.

–Alex

P.S. Argentina beat Brazil 3-0, earning its place in the final to defend its gold medallist status.

Whozat inspires a song from a fan

Wednesday, August 13th, 2008

Check out this diva’s homage to Whozat. Thanks!!!

–Alex

abInventio operations weather the earthquake

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

As Yahoo’s Santa Monica offices dealt with an hour-long power outage and cell phones turned useless all day across Southern California, abInventio’s websites remained fully operational through the 5.4-magnitude earthquake. None of our data centers serving Whozat, HoundWire, REPcloud and QLess in Altadena, Santa Monica or Texas were affected. Indeed, HoundWire was among the first news organizations to report the earthquake, within a half hour of the event.

–Alex

Whozat’s semantic engine faces off with Powerset’s and Hakia’s, wins 5-0

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

We have previously noted that Whozat’s semantic engine provides better search results than Google. This is not surprising, as Google is not a semantic engine. But what about the semantic engines that have been raising so much hoopla lately, after Powerset sold to Microsoft for a rumored $100MM? Here is a comparison between Whozat’s, Powerset’s and Hakia’s semantic engines for the first five queries I tried on them:

First I asked the 3 engines “What company has Silvia Moos started?”. Silvia is my mother, and she started two companies: Centralab and Klik Mental Fitness. I picked that search to be fair to Powerset, as I knew that the answer can be found in Wikipedia, and Powerset only searches Wikipedia. Powerset found no results:

powerset-what-company-has-silvia-moos-started.jpg

Hakia found one of the companies but failed to find the other:

hakia-what-company-has-silvia-moos-started.jpg

Whozat found both, and put them front and central in the concept cloud:

whozat-what-company-has-silvia-moos-started-w-wikipedia-mouseover.jpg

Then I went for a non people search (did you know that you can use Whozat’s powerful interactive semantic engine for regular, non-people searches simply by using the keyword field and leaving names blank?). I did a search I had done before: Whittier compost (looking for a company called Whittier that sells compost). Powerset did not return anything –not surprisingly, as Wikipedia is a much more limited source of information than the WWW:

powerset-whittier-compost.jpg

Hakia did better, but failed to return the site sought (Whittierfertilizer.com):

hakia-whittier-compost.jpg

Whozat yielded the desired site

whozat-whittier-compost.jpg

I asked Igor for a search in Russian, and he gave me Владимир Ленин. Powerset asked me if I meant something else:

powerset-lenin.jpg

Hakia gave results in Russian, but failed to make the connection to Lenin’s English name, even when asked Who is Владимир Ленин:

hakia-lenin.jpg

Whozat gave the answer, Vladimir Lenin, front and central in the concept cloud:

whozat-lenin.jpg

At that point I did an SQL query, but forgot the command to sort, and used sort by instead of order by. So I searched for the right command in all 3 engines. Powerset had no clue that sort by was related to order by:

powerset-sql-sort-by.jpg

Neither did Hakia, at least not on the top 3 results:

hakia-sql-sort-by.jpg

Whozat gave the desired result in its first link and in the concept cloud:

whozat-sql-sort-by.jpg

A final one: I searched for how to buy a train ticket from Los Angeles to Albuquerque. Powerset gave relevant information, but no link to the Amtrak site (again, limited to the Wikipedia corpus):

powerset-train-los-angeles-albuquerque.jpg

Hakia gave lots of links, but not one of them was to Amtrak’s site (not on the 1st page, at least):

hakia-train-los-angeles-albuquerque.jpg

Finally, Whozat gave the relevant Amtrak links on results 1, 2 and 3:

whozat-train-los-angeles-albuquerque.jpg

Combine that with the fact that Whozat’s semantic engine, unlike Powerset’s, is language-independent…

’nuff said. Lots of work left to do.  And it’s only 1 AM.

–Alex