ArnoldIT Makes Overflight Changes

December 31, 2010

A new year is fast approaching. We have updated the Overflight service. We use the public facing and the behind the firewall version to track hundreds of companies in search and content processing. The public service is at www.arnoldit.com/overflight. When you click on the name of a company—for instance, Autonomy—the system pulls down content from some useful sources. You can see Moreover news, tweets, and blog posts about the company. We added YouTube videos, but there are mostly false drops. Some search vendors have names that are the same as a rock and roll bank (Thunderstone) or were used by shady operators in far off climes (Brainware). But when I make a video for Exalead, it will turn up in the Exalead video display on Overflight.

The changes for 2011 include:

  • Rescoring and dropping the search vendors who are fleeing from enterprise search just belly flopped. We note these points, but do not elaborate on them in the public service. You can obtain current write ups on more than 50 vendors, but we do charge for these.
  • Adding some companies, including a hot data fusion outfit (Digital Reasoning), the business intelligence player (Attivio), and a very interesting text processing outfit (Content Analyst).
  • Tweaked the search terms to try and make the results more relevant. SDI (selective dissemination of information) queries often generate tons of false hits. We fiddled with the IBM and Oracle search strings, which are not particularly amenable to Boolean queries. We try for the public service to make the pages useful.

We anticipate that some vendors will want to know why they are not listed on the Overflight service. We cannot accommodate in the free service every search vendor. We use our judgment about what to put in the free Overflight service.

How do we use Overflight?

  • When I get a call from an outfit with money to invest, I use Overflight to see which companies are hot on the days I am doing research. Check out the listings for Dieselpoint. You can see that there’s not much action. Now check out IBM OmniFind. See. The coverage provides a signal.
  • We use Overflight to track trends.
  • We find nuggets that other systems do not surface.

We do sell space in Beyond Search and interviews in the Search Wizards Speak series. Details about what we sell are on the ArnoldIT.com Web site.

In 2011, we will add a data fusion Overflight. You can read our new blog www.inteltrax.com and see if the content interests you.

The free stuff is provided for anyone’s use. Libraries and academic institutions can recycle the material without contacting me. Commercial outfits are asked to request permission to use this information. If you have a complaint or suggestion, use the comments section of Beyond Search or write seaky2000 at yahoo dot com. We check the Yahoo account every week or so.

Stephen E Arnold, December 31, 2010

Freebie. Free is offered “as is”.

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