EasyAsk: Exclusive Interview with Craig Bassin
November 22, 2010
EasyAsk was one of the first search vendors who demonstrated access to structured and unstructured data from a single interface. The firm is now under new ownership, and I wanted to get an update about the company and its technology.
Last week, I was able to talk with Craig Bassin, a former partner in an investment firm. Mr. Bassin is now pushing EasyAsk forward and made his excitement about the company, its technology, and future palpable. The full text of my interview with Mr. Bassin is available in the Search Wizards Speak series at this link.
I want to highlight two points from the one hour interview because each provides useful insight into a company that can compete with such firms as Endeca as well as vendors of technology to organizations struggling with information retrieval.
First, Mr. Bassin calls attention to the EasyAsk natural language processing method. He said:
While EasyAsk also supports the navigational style of search we go much further in helping customers find what they want quickly. EasyAsk’s natural language approach allows buyers to enter an entire descriptive phrase of exactly what they want. The natural language and semantic processing engine understands the context of the search and returns accurate results on the first page, greatly increasing conversion rates. With EasyAsk, customers can chose how they want to find products, and they will find them faster… EasyAsk enables e-commerce websites to always return search results, reducing the number of lost visitors.
My take is that NLP technology is getting more attention now that the limitations of key word searching and laundry lists of results are more well known. (In fact, my column each month for KMWorld will address the use of NLP and semantic technology in the enterprise starting in January 2011.)
Second, I probed Mr. Bassin about EasyAsk’s enterprise solution. He told me:
As you well know, the typical enterprise search product is geared towards allowing users to search unstructured or semi-structured data using keywords to find documents they need. This is good when a user is looking for a specific document, like a contract or performance review. EasyAsk Business Edition addresses a completely different problem – giving casual users faster, easier access to corporate data. At our core, EasyAsk is all about Natural Language linguistic processing, that is, understanding the ‘intent’ of any given question, or query. We’ve extended our intuitive search capability into corporate data allowing users to search, analyze, report and share results. … We designed EasyAsk for casual business users who need immediate access to data so they can make informed decisions improving their ability to increase sales, service customers and execute operational processes. And, they can’t wait a few weeks for IT or a data analyst to get them a custom report.
To learn more about EasyAsk, navigate to www.easyask.com. You can read other interviews in the Search Wizards Speak series at this link.
Stephen E Arnold, November 22, 2010
Freebie but there is always hope…
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