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Xerox Preps FactSpotter Document Search

by Terrence O'Brien on April 1, 2008 at 10:15 AM

Xerox Preps FactSpotter Document Search
Xerox is getting ready to burst on to the search engine scene with FactSpotter.
Of course by 'burst' I mean quietly slip the feature into an enterprise software package aimed at legal and regulatory professionals, with no plans for wider distribution.

But that's ok, someone else will pick up on the innovative work here and make millions (or billions) off of it. Just like a little guy called Steve Jobs and his visit with Xerox's Alto in 1979.

FactSpotter is a document search engine that, to use the quote from Xerox that every other media outlet is glomming on to, "goes beyond conventional 'keyword' search." FactSpotter is a text mining engine that understands categorization and context surrounding a search term. Searching for Jon Stewart won't just return instances of the exact words 'Jon Stewart', but also instances of 'he' or 'him' where it would be referring to Jon Stewart.

The engine not only returns results by pointing you to a document with what you were searching for, but takes you to and highlights the exact portion of the document where the results are located. According to Xerox FactSpotter is not restricted by language, location or file format, and due to its plain language linguistic search engine can "take advantage of the way humans think, speak and ask questions."

From TechCrunch

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