Francois Schiettecatte, FS Consulting
June 1, 2009
Through a mutual contact, I reconnected with François Schiettecatte, a search engine expert with other computer wizard skills in his toolbox. Mr. Schiettecatte worked on a natural language processing project in the late 1990s. He shifted focus and was a co-founder of Feedster.com. He told that he had contributed to a number of interesting projects and revealed that he was working on a new search and content processing system.
Mr. Schiettecatte consented to an interview. I spoke with him on May 29, and I put the full text of our discussion in the ArnoldIT.com Search Wizards Speak collection. You can find that series of interviews with influential figures in search and content processing here.
Mr. Schiettecatte and I had a lively discussion and he offered some interesting insights into the trajectory of search and retrieval. Let me highlight two of his comments and invite you to read the full text of the discussion here.
In response to a question about the new start ups entering the search and retrieval sector, Mr. Schiettecatte said:
You can apply different search approaches to different data sets, for example traditional search as well as NLP search to the same set of documents. And certain data set will lend themselves more naturally to one type of search as opposed to another. Of course user needs are key here in deciding what approaches work best for what data. I would also add that we have only begun to tackle search and that there is much more to be done, and new companies are usually the ones willing to bring new approaches to the market.
We then discussed the continuing interest in semantic technology. On this matter, Mr. Schiettecatte offered:
More data to search usually means more possible answers to a search, which means that I have to scan more to arrive at the answer, improved precision will go a long way to address that issue. A more pedestrian way to put this is: “I don’t care if there are about a million result, I just want the one result”. Also, having the search engine take the extra step in extracting data out of the search results and synthesizing that data into a meaningful table/report. This is more complicated but I has the potential to really save time in the long run.
For more information about Mr. Schiettecatte’s most recent project, read the full text of the interview here.
Stephen Arnold, June 2, 2009
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[…] Posted in General, Search by François Schiettecatte on June 1, 2009 I was lucky to be interviewed by Steve Arnold for his “Search Wizards Speak” feature. The full interview is here. […]