Souped-up Search
It's Feb. 1, the score is tied, 83-83, and under a deafening roar, University of North Carolina (UNC) basketball center Brendan Haywood steps to the free-throw line with only 1.2 seconds remaining in a game on archrival Duke University's home court. Haywood sinks both free throws, and after Duke misses a last-second basket attempt, UNC wins. For those teams' rabid fans, it's the biggest upset in the history of the heated matchup since -- well, since when? To find the answer, fans might take to searching the Web for statistics on the longtime rivalry.
Until recently, they wouldn't have found answers easily; searching for statistics on the Web has been futile. Though the information is somewhere out there, it's probably on multiple, unconnected pages. No search engine has been able to stitch the relevant statistics together.
But new technology is beginning to change the rules for searches. For the first time, users schooled in the intricacies of the Boolean search language's ands and nots are using natural language. They're also relying upon tools that can recognize images, search statistical databases and extract relevant information from unconnected sources. These features are appearing not only in online search engines such as Excite@Home or Seattle-based sports site ESPN.com, but also in venerable enterprise content-management software, for searching corporate documents and knowledge bases.
Point technology improvements are steps toward a greater goal. Someday, a search engine will be able to intelligently extract context from any question, find the information it needs from various sources and then present it in a usable format. Susan Feldman, an analyst at IDC in Framingham, Mass., calls this state of search nirvana "the answer machine" -- ask anything on a search engine, and it finds the answer. Until that halcyon day, there are some new point technologies that could make corporate and Web searching slightly easier.
Fun With Numbers
Given the importance of statistics in sports, it's no wonder that ESPN.com, which receives about 2.5 million page views per day, wanted a statistics-friendly search engine for its site. For years, the company had been asking, "How do we get into a less-structured query environment?" says Geoff Reiss, senior vice president of programming, production and operations at ESPN Internet Group, which is part of ABC Inc. in New York.
The problem is that most search engines can't analyze charts and databases; they can only note frequency of words. But word groups don't necessarily add up to real concepts.
ESPN began using services from Fact City Inc. in Waltham, Mass., last year to enable searches for statistics from professional sports leagues or college athletics.
"What we can do now is create comparisons and [provide] context," says Reiss. The ultimate goal, he adds, is to replicate the moment "when a baseball fan picks up the baseball encyclopedia and gets lost in the serendipity of it." Although that isn't yet a reality, during last year's NCAA college basketball tournament, some ESPN users literally spent hours searching through the Web site's collections
Symantec Backup Exec 12 and Backup Exec System Recovery 8 deliver industry leading Windows data protection and system recovery. Download this whitepaper to find out the top reasons to upgrade and how to get continuous data protection and complete system recovery.
Data and system loss — from a hard drive failure, malicious attack, natural disaster, or simple human error — can happen anytime. Don’t leave your business vulnerable. Make sure you have a secure recovery strategy in place. Symantec's latest backup and system recovery technology can efficiently restore critical applications, individual emails and documents and even restore your entire system in minutes in the event of a loss.
Businesses face a growing challenge to ensure that the IT environment is properly protected. Backup Exec 12 integrates with other applications in the Symantec family of products, to complement your current data protection strategy, keep your data securely backed up and make it recoverable when you need it most.
