Global PR Blog Week 2.0

By Bob Wyman, PubSub | As I May Think…

For information professionals, whether it be in academic, research or business environments, finding the information you need as quickly as possible is vitally important. People cannot afford to wait for technology to catch up to the rapid pace of which new information and news is generated. Today’s traditional search engines utilize “retrospective searchâ€?, that is, they store information and allow users to query that database to find what they’re searching for. A new trend in search, “Prospective search”, stores a user’s queries and “matches” them against new information items passing through their Matching Engine.

Companies such as PubSub (whose matching engine is currently able to handle billions of matches per second), are using this technology to deliver information in real-time, or even better, can “search the future�.

Benefits to prospective search include:

1. An Internet scale “matching” engine (as opposed to traditional search) reads millions of data sources on subscribers’ behalf and notifies them instantly whenever a match is made.
2. True “prospective” search (versus traditional retrospective search) on an Internet scale allows subscribers to be alerted whenever relevant news is published. Therefore, users are aware of news as it happens. This bears importance to material events such as travel (airline delays), natural disasters, and local weather alerts, to name a few.
3. One of the first viable tools for searching the “hidden Web” — the vast area of information not “crawlable” by traditional search engines.

With technology that “searches the future�, the capability to receive information in the most efficient manner comes hand-in-hand. RSS feeders allow users to be in front of valuable information as soon as it becomes available- including on mobile devices. Whether it be disaster information, political news discussions, or corporate reputation management, timeliness is everything.

So why is this important? This kind of real-time access to information as it appears - or true “push” technology - is core to the future of the Web and the future of search.
“Matching” technology is also much better than traditional search at providing access to the “hidden web” - those vast repositories of proprietary databases or other types of information not “crawlable” by traditional search engines. The hidden web is estimated to be 400-500 times larger than the visible web. Blogs are becoming increasingly more respected as a viable news source. If your search engine cannot search blogs, you’re missing out on what billions of people are talking about.

About the author

Bob Wyman, CTO and co-founder of PubSub has been developing innovative, industry leading products for over 25 years. Prior to PubSub Mr. Wyman was instrumental in the creation of DEC’s ALL-IN-1, the first customizable and integrated office automation suite. ALL-IN-1 became the market leading OA product of the 80’s, earning as much as $2 billion per year in leveraged revenue. Also while at DEC Mr. Wyman was software licensing architect and was awarded some of the earliest patents in the field of Digital Rights Management. As Senior Product Manager for Applications Programmability at Microsoft, Mr. Wyman was responsible for OLE Automation, the first widely used and practical architecture for implementing reusable code components. Mr. Wyman has held senior engineering positions at Medio Multimedia, HealthGate Data Corporation, Marketwave, Accrue Software and firstRain.