How often have you searched on a term. only to find that 50-60% of what Google serves up is totally irrelevant? I reckon about 10% of my site traffic turns up by accident, largely because of a Google search. I feel sorry for those who are disappointed because there’s nothing more irritating than time wasted trying to find ‘stuff.’ At the same time, different search engines deliver wildly different results. As Redmonk recently discovered, much to James Governor’s annoyance.
Large businesses attempt to overcome this by using internal search appliances from the likes of Google. These work up to a point but as we now know, useful information might be anywhere. You’re forced to enrich internal data with the multiple cruff piles out in the Internet cloud. Inevitably, someone has to make value judgments which always leave you vaguely sensing that you’ve not quite nailed it with all appropriate data sources. Enter Attensa and RealTime Matrix.
I spoke with Scott Niesen, director of marketing at Attensa and Jon Sofield of RealTime Matrix the other evening to figure out what this means and how it works. RealTimeMatrix, which, according to its blog is tapping into more than a million items per day, delivers only the news you want. This, from RTM’s site:
Conceptually, it’s pretty simple: take millions of live content feeds and correlate millions of preferences for content against them in real time. When an “item†matches within an acceptable coefficient, deliver it to any Internet-connected device.
In practice it isn’t though RTM has solved the riddle. Attensa turns this fine grained information into an enterprise RSS feed allowing the user to effectively mash up the most appropriate information required for the task in hand from any source.
On the call, we discussed a number of scenarios including brokerage house trading floors, pharmaceutical drug development, telco utility service delivery and competitive analysis. These are all segments I know well and where real time information is business critical.
I like the sound of this. On my site, I’ve implemented a number of RSS feeds that allow anyone to consume news from other sites without necessarily having to leave my home page. A good example is the tabbed Grazr widget in my sidebar which delivers information from my blogroll. BTW – you’re welcome to swipe this for your own site. But it isn’t perfect and provides no search capability. Another widget manages inbound news using different search terms. This is not great as I see a lot of cruff. It means that while readers have at least one time saver, I’m far from operating in an optimal manner.
For SMBs, I can envisage this kind of real time data analysis being useful for news flash items. Imagine what that might have meant for farmers when the last UK foot and mouth outbreak occurred. Could animals and livelihoods have been saved? You bet. Remember the confusion about what was going on, the resultant carnage and economic fall out? If professionals were sharing that type of information with clients, how quickly might they be able to react to change? How about competitive positioning when considering new business investments?
This combination is one to watch and I’m hoping this partnership will deliver a low cost appliance for small practices alongside the big enterprise ‘stuff.’ In the meantime RTM has developed a neat demo at i.Jam which is well worth your attention. Who knows, it might solve Redmonk’s positioning issues? -:)
PS: Thanks to Sam Sethi and Vecosys for making the introduction.
Technorati Tags: Google, redmonk, river of news, RSS, search
