Here is an example of how the Darwin Awareness Engine™ can uncover breaking news stories and the shortcomings of traditional search for this task. Now search is great when you know what you are looking for and I use Google search every day for this purpose. However, if you do not know what key words to put into your queries to find the unexpected a search engine falls short. This is one of the goals of an awareness engine. Here is how it works using the Toyotas recall as an example. Thanks to our friend Romain Goday for this example.
The Buzz Tape™ runs across the top of the screen and shows topics of rising coverage in your target source, in this case general news sites and blogs. Below we see that Toyota is a rising topic of interest.
Making Toyota the focus of a Scan Cloud™ brings up the term ‘recall’ as the predominate theme in the past hour.
Clicking on the term recall shows the related articles in the right column.
Looking at one we see an article on the recall.
We can also explore other articles. In addition we can change to focus from “Toyota” to “recall” to see what else is happening in the recall space. Let’s see what a Google search at the same time on Toyota brings.
There is nothing on the recall. In addition searching on the term “recall” brings up nothing on Toyota.
In we combine Toyota and recall – “Toyota recall” – we find one article in Google news but we have had to anticipate this combination. The Darwin Awareness Engine does not require this anticipation and lets you discover the breaking story regardless of whether you were looking for it.
So we can see the traditional search engines have trouble with breaking news as it takes some time for items to become poplar and rise to the top. Google news helps but you have to anticipate trends to get good results. In contrast an awareness engine let’s you discover the unexpected. Rather than looking at a lot of RSS feeds, it aggregates the content scanning processes to single screen. Here is how it helped the St. Louis PBS affiliate track in real time the conversations in the US immigration debate.
Comments