Thunderstone’s John Turnbull Interviewed
April 7, 2008
John Turnbull, dhief executive of Thunderstone Software LLC, said, “People are quite surprised to learn that Thunderstone pioneeded concept-based searching, real-time searching, and simultaneous search of both structured and unstructured data in the 1980s.”
Thunderstone, based in Cleveland, Ohio, offers a full range of search and retrieval systems for entrprise (behind-the-firewall), Web, and Web site search. The company’s flagship system is Texis. He said in an interviewed with ArnoldIT.com:
Texis is our high-powered search platform that licensees can employ to build complex search applications. Texis offers NLP [natural language search], parametric search, and the ability to index non-text objects like video. Texis has application programming interfaces. Our customers embed, integrate, and customize Texis into many different enterprise applications. These range from BI [business intelligence] to litigation support.
The company has introduced a parametric search appliance that delivers significant performance gains over competing products such as Google’s Search Appliance. Describing the use of his company’s ready-to-run solution, he said:
… Let’s say an employee needs to search for a particular product-item description across the entire enterprise. Keyword, full-text search will certainly provide a good list of results from a variety of documents and content sources. But what if you were only interested in the item’s occurrence within a specific document type (say, a purchase order), and one that was issued after a certain date and by a specific purchasing agent? Keyword, full-text search simply cannot provide this context for the information you’re pursuing.
He added:
I think there’s a growing realization that there are many reasons for search, and that the most appropriate results will depend on what the user is doing at that time. This includes explicit search, where the user asks a question, and implicit search where results are available based on what the user is doing, as well as if the user is asking for specific information, trying to retrieve a specific document, looking for background information or something else.
You can read the complete interview on the ArnoldIT.com Web site in its exclusive “Search Wizards Speak” feature. Additional information about Thunderstone Texis and its other products may be found on the Thunderstone Web site.
Stephen Arnold, April 7, 2008
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