ACIS Consulting demonstrates FAST ESP integration with BING Maps for delivery of highly interactive, location aware, search experience to end users.

Customers who are searching for location based services and products, such as real estate listing of government services office, can make a better informed decision if the search results are presented in the context of a map. After all, location, location, location is the key mantra for a real estate valuation.

ACIS developed this entegration layer between FAST and BING Maps to demonstrate the value add of such a highly interactive and engaging user experience that leads to knowledge discovery that helps consumers make more informed decisions.

One of the great benefits of the acquisition of FAST by Microsoft is that it now offers an opportunity for a much tighter integration between FAST and Bing Maps.

Please contact us if you’d like to arrange for a quick demo of this solution.

ACIS Consulting has developed an advanced “social network inference engine” mid-layer product that extends the capability of the FAST ESP Relevancy Ranking engine to learn from user interaction patterns to return highly relevant and targeted results.

Search Engine Technology is continually pushing the envelope and trying to reconcile the paradox of exponentially increasing volumes of content that must be processed with the need to return only a handful of the most relevant results among millions of documents. The proverbial “needle in a hay stack”.

To make matters even more complicated, relevancy of search results is subjective and directly dependent on who the user is. For example a doctor entering a search keyword “diabetes treament” is probably looking for something vastly different from a newly diagnosed patient entering the search keyword “diabetes treatment”.

A search engine could return more relevant search results if it can be enabled to process the interest profile of a user along with the submitted search keyword. It can deliver even more relevant search results if the search engine were to also be fed, not only the profile of the user, but also what types of documents would be of insterest to such users.

The Social Network Inference Engine product was developed by ACIS Consulting to be able to compute such user profile and document profile indicators and enable FAST ESP to return highly targeted and highly relevant search results.

The inference engine layer is designed to track all user transction event types and build user profile and document profile vectors. These profile vectors are continually refined and expanded as more and more transcations take place and direct user feedback and user demographic information come into play.

The inference engine is thus able to distinguish between “patient profile” and “doctor profile” and use this inference to rank profiles of documents that are deemed more suitable for doctors or patients. This inference engine can be configured to process any kinds of user or organizational classification. It could be sales team profile versus developer team profiles or it could be matching of recommended recipe based on user interest profile.

This inference engine layer has been designed to be plugged into multitudes of business applications where matching of search results to the user profiles provides an important value add.

ACIS Consulting showcases advanced integration of FAST ESP with multimedia processing technologies to enable indexing and search of live TV and Radio programs broadcast in English and French languages.

As everyone is well awre, the use of video broadcasts and audio podcasts has been growing rapidly over the past few years. This trend has experienced explosive growth with the advent of youtube and similar services.

The immediate challenge that comes with this exponential growth of multimedia content is finding a specific video or audio clip that relates to a given topic or search keyword.

Implementing a complete end-to-end system that indexes a video or audio feed requires tight integration and information exchange between various processing components including content capture system, voice to text conversion, feeding and indexing by FAST ESP, integration of search results processing for clip alignment and playback presentation.

This solution was successfully implemented and showcased to demonstrate the overall system capability to index live video broadcast feeds in real time.

Users are able to monitor and index multi-channel broadcasts and search for specific keywords to display the exact clip they are looking for.

Please contact us if you’d like to arrange for a quick demo on this product.

ACIS Consulting becomes among the first to be Microsoft Certified with Search Competency in FAST ESP.

You may have heard of the recent announcements about Google Instant Results (TM) which is being touted as a new way to do search in the consumer search space.

Our area of focus is in implementing search within the Enterprsie and we decided to see what it would take to implement this using FAST ESP and to evaluate the benefits of such an interaction paradigm for a public facing site search.

We were able to standup a simple implementation of a different variation of such an approach, within two days, by leveraging a recent FAST Enterprise Search project we did for Service and Location Finder (SLF) we did for the Ontario Govt.
We dubbed approach “FAST Results” 😉

What we found ?

The dynamic interaction might be appealing to internet savvy users who are used to consuming a lot of information very quickly.

The volume of unrelated content presented can sometimes be a little disconcerting. For example if you are looking for “Vacuum Cleaners” you might see results about Verizon, Vans, Vacations etc. before you see vacuum cleaner related FAST results returned. The reason for this is, of course understandable.

Our Conclusion ?

Within the Enterprise Search arena, an interaction paradigm such as FAST Results might be quite useful in environments where the domain of content being searched is well defined. E.g. List of services offered, book titles or restaurant search.