USDA Research Now Easily Searchable by Public
February 16, 2015
In order to give citizens more access to research from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the National Agricultural Library (NAL) has launched a new, public-facing search engine called PubAg. The USDA’s Agricultural Research Service tells us about the tool in, “NAL Unveils New Search Engine for Published USDA Research.” It looks a lot like a Lucene/Solr system to us; that choice would not be at all surprising. The post tells us:
“PubAg, which can be found at PubAg.nal.usda.gov, is a new portal for literature searches and full-text access of more than 40,000 scientific journal articles by USDA researchers, mostly from 1997 to 2014. New articles by USDA researchers will be added almost daily, and older articles may be added if possible. There is no access fee for PubAg.
“Phase I of PubAg provides access for searches of 340,000 peer-reviewed agriculturally related scientific literature, mostly from 2002 to 2012, each entry offering a citation, abstract and a link to the article if available from the publisher. This initial group of highly relevant, high-quality literature was taken from the 4 million bibliographic citations in NAL’s database.”
The agency has worked to make the system easy to use for folks from farmers to academicians. So easy, in fact, that there’s no registration — no user name or password is needed. We’re told that NAL maintains “one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive compilations of agricultural information.” Now they’ve made that wealth of knowledge available to us all.
Cynthia Murrell, February 16, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Behind Search Improvements at Pinterest
February 13, 2015
As a Pinterest user myself, I know how important the site’s search function is. Now, as Gigaom informs us, “Pinterest Explains How It’s Making Its Search Work Better.” It sounds like an approach to semantic machine learning inspired by the crowdsourcing phenomenon. Writer Jonathan Vanian tells us:
“Dong Wang, the Pinterest software engineer who wrote the post, explained that even though a user may search for the word ‘turkey,’ it’s unclear what exactly that person may be looking for. Does he want to find turkey recipes, is he planning a trip to Turkey or is he just interested in poultry — it’s hard to say without some context.
“If that person decides to search for ‘turkey recipes’ as part of his next query, Pinterest takes that into account and can assume that the next person who may be searching for ‘turkey’ might also be craving some turkey recipes as well; maybe it’s holiday season and everyone’s hungry. Pinterest learned that ‘the information extracted from previous query log has shown to be effective in understanding the user’s search intent’ and this can be applied to other Pinterest users as well.”
Pinterest’s data-collection workflow is called QueryJoin, and engineers use it to draw conclusions like the one about turkey recipes, above. Factors analyzed also include data like pins’ image signatures and “engagement stats” like the number of clicks and re-pins it has received. For more information, see Dong Wang’s original post.
Cynthia Murrell, February 13, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Is an Intelligent Photo Search Possible?
February 10, 2015
Microsoft is doing its best to maintain relevancy in the technology market. Its rivals, Google and Apple, are eating up all the customers and smacking their lips at the deliciousness of their success. Microsoft has not given up the battle and according to PC World, “Microsoft One Drive Adds Super-Intellifenct Searching Of Document Text, Photos.” OneDrive is Microsoft’s cloud service and it has been upgraded to include Microsoft Research and Bing techniques to examine, tag, and analyze photos aka intelligent photo search.
Once photos are uploaded into OneDrive they will be scanned by OCR to gather information and apply tags. This feature is part of Microsoft’s new automated image recognition technology. Microsoft will also make the cloud easier to use:
“Microsoft also will make it easier to actually get your photos into the cloud through a new “Camera Imports” folder, which will be rolling out over the next month. Once you connect a camera or USB stick to your Windows 7 or 8 computer, photos will be automatically siphoned off and stored in Microsoft’s cloud. Likewise, if you snap a screenshot on a Windows 7 or Windows 8 machine, it too will be stored in OneDrive—a feature that’s already in Windows Phone today.”
The Internet has always been a visual medium, but accessibility of cameras has increased that and people want to organize and find their photos like they can their text files. Good move, Microsoft.
Whitney Grace, February 10, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Meet the Crazy Search Uncle of KDE
February 9, 2015
We all have those weird relatives that drop by during the holidays or odd times during the year. Ken Starks of Foss Force used the metaphor in “Desktop Search: KDE’s Crazy Uncle” to explain his views about KDE desktop search. Starks says that you can rely on KDE’s desktop search to be unreliable, like that crazy uncle who can’t hold down a job or a marriage.
Kfind, the default search, cannot find any files, especially when Starks knew they were in there. After some grumbling, he shares his experiences with KDS search software that does work. He liked using GNOME, Nepomuk to index, Dolphin, and his current search of choice: Catfish. He stresses that he loves working with KDE, he just wants the out-of-the-box search engines to work well instead of having to download a third party app:
“I installed a search app I use in Xfce and I didn’t have to drag in too many GTK dependencies to do it. It’s called “Catfish”…. find it a bit odd that a third party app surpasses the native KDE search application. Catfish gets it right. It’s a darned shame that it isn’t native to KDE.”
He has gotten some comments about using the command line and fussing with the code, but Starks’ retort is that most users do not know how to use those lines. They want to log into a system and have it work right through the user interface. Crazy idea, is it not?
Whitney Grace, February 09, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Graphic Pits dtSearch against Lucene
February 6, 2015
An oddball TechWars graphic suggests that Lucene is making life difficult for vendors of proprietary search systems. In the site’s head-to-head “dtSearch vs Lucene” comparison, the open source solution seems to handily trounce dtSearch. Of course, for us, Lucene means Elasticsearch. For those unfamiliar with TechWars, here’s what the site’s description of what it does:
Data-driven: TechWars shows objective data gathered from the web to help you make the right decision when choosing technology for your projects.
Up-to-date: TechWars scans the web to catch the latest trends, so you can sit back and relax while we keep you updated.
Professional: TechWars is built for professionals, by professionals. Let’s build the best tech comparison tool together!
Community: TechWars serves the developer community by opening case studies for discussion. We are always open to requests and feedback via Facebook and Twitter.
The graphic compares dtSearch and Lucene in several areas. We’re told that 196 of TechWars users use Lucene, versus just 15 who use dtSearch. Under the “which companies use it?” heading, sixteen companies (several high-profile) are listed for Lucene, but “no companies found” for dtSearch. Um, it seems like a pretty shallow dataset they’re tapping into there. The site does use Google data for one comparison—a graph that shows how very many more folks have searched for information on Lucene than on dtSearch. At a glance, Lucene would seem to be coming out ahead.
Cynthia Murrell, February 06, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Google Search Parameters Revealed
February 4, 2015
Short Honk: One of my two or three readers alerted me to a useful summary of Google’s search parameters. The list is available from BackLinkSentry. Google’s advanced search page is helpful but not particularly fine grained. This list of switches will unlock content that is in the Google index but not findable with a two or three word query slapped in the Google search box. Worth having at one’s fingertips in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, February 3, 2015
Twitter Relies on Bing’s Translation Engine to Offer Tweet Translations
February 4, 2015
The article on Search Engine Journal titled Twitter Teams Up With Bing To Offer Translated Tweets expands on the announcement by Twitter that they will be bringing back the translation of tweets. The project was abandoned in 2013, but has returned with the assistance of Bing’s translation engine. While the service is not without flaws, the article suggests that it beats no translation ability at all.
“The company admits that the service is far from perfect and still needs to be worked on: “… the results still vary and often fall below the accuracy and fluency of translations provided by a professional translator.”
While the service no doubt leaves something to be desired, it’s still an improvement over the zero built-in options they had before. Bing’s translation engine works with more than 40 language pairs, and is currently available on Twitter.com, Twitter for iOS and Android, and TweetDeck.”
If you are interested in setting up the translator you need to change your account settings to “Show Tweet translations.” Once this has been established, clicking on the globe icon will show a translation of the original text. Since the company already allows for the fact that this is not a professional translator, we can only wonder how any translation service will handle the fluidity of abbreviations and slang on Twitter.
Chelsea Kerwin, February 04, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Current.ly App Enables Improved Search on Twitter
February 4, 2015
The review on KillerStartups titled Finally! An Effective Way to Filter Twitter! discusses Current.ly and their algorithm for sorting through the noise on Twitter. Unlike Facebook, the article mentions, Twitter has avoided the use of filters, opting for the chaos of every tweet for itself. Beyond following specific conversations or searching via hashtag, there are not very effective methods for organizing and finding relevant tweets. Current.ly offers a solution:
“Current.ly not only presents the most timely topics front and center on both their mobile-optimized site and app but also lets you search for topics that interest you, again presenting the most relevant tweets before the general jibber-jabber. It’s a great solution for anyone who wants to keep up on the conversations around current events but for whom even the thought of opening Twitter’s main feed makes them sigh with frustration.”
This would improve the hashtag search function, which is still going to present a mess of tweets. Current.ly’s search algorithm promises to bring the more relevant tweets to the forefront. Additionally sweet for many Twitter-users, Current.ly is not an app unique to use in the United States. It allows the user to pick between the US, the UK, the Netherlands, Spain and Mexico. The article surmises that this list will grow as the app becomes more popular.
Chelsea Kerwin, February 04, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Apache Solr Search NoSQL Search Shines Solo
February 3, 2015
Apache Solr is an open source enterprise search engine that is used for relational databases and Hadoop. ZDNet’s article, “Why Apache Solr Search Is On The Rise And Why It’s Going Solo” explores why its lesser-known use as a NoSQL store might explode in 2015.
At the beginning of 2014, the most Solr deployments were using it in the old-fashioned way, but 2015 shows that fifty percent of the pipeline is now using it as a first class data store. Companies are upgrading their old file intranets for the enterprise cloud. They want the upgraded system to be searchable and they are relying on Solr to get the job done.
Search is more complex than basic NoSQL and needs something more robust to handle the new data streams. Solr adds the extra performance level, so users have access to their data and nothing is missing.
” ‘So when we talk about Solr, it’s all your data, all the time at scale. It’s not just a guess that we think is likely the right answer. ‘We’re going to go ahead and push this one forward’. We guarantee the quality of those results. In financial services and other areas where guarantees are important, that makes Solr attractive,’ [CEO Will Hayes of LucidWorks, Apache Solr’s commercial sponsor] said.”
It looks like anything is possible for LucidWorks in the coming year.
Whitney Grace, February 03, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
A Microsoft Azure How to PHP Search
February 2, 2015
Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure that has a variety of functions. If you want to hook up Microsoft Azure Search to your PHP Web site and are at a loss about what to do, then you need to check out this MSDN blog by Nick J Trogh. Simply titled Nick’s Blog, Trogh writes about “all things technical about the Microsoft platform.” He recently posted a guide about how to integrate Azure Search service into a PHP Web site and take advantage of advanced search techniques.
Trogh does not complicate the installation process and includes screenshots for easy reference. He ends with two last pieces of advice:
“In this article we’ve gone through adding search as a service using Azure Search to your PHP website. In a matter of minutes you can get started and provide your users with a complex search functionality. And as your site gets more traffic, you can easily scale out your search service. Make sure to get started with the Azure Search service and also try out the other application, data and infrastructure services in the Microsoft Azure platform. You can get started for free on Azure or activate your MSDN Azure benefits.”
Azure is turning out to be a decent cloud service and much more favored than Windows 8. It is rare to see that Microsoft fans are justified in their praise for Windows.
Whitney Grace, February 02, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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