Comments on: Financial Times + Endeca = Newssift

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 16:15:36 +0000

Guy, thanks! I’m delighted by what FT and Endeca built together in such a short time frame, and there’s a great backlog of ideas for next steps.

By: Guy Valerio

Guy Valerio — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 12:18:04 +0000

@Steve Gurney
Hi Steve. Yes, Jesse did some excellent work for us in 2004 as did FAST and SOM. We understood faceted classification back then; in fact that is what we specified

Daniel – great blog,
Guy

By: Newssift » Blog Archive » Newssift Beta Launch

Newssift » Blog Archive » Newssift Beta Launch — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:35:59 +0000

[...] Noisy Channel Financial Times + Endeca = Newssift This entry was posted on Friday, March 20th, 2009 at 8:14 am and is filed under News + Events. [...]

By: Thomas Kjelsrud

Thomas Kjelsrud — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 11:38:44 +0000

Although very cool technically and with cool features like sentiment, I did not find it that user friendly. The way it reloads the page and stacks criterias made it difficult for me to “reset” and start searches from scratch. It has strolled away somewhat from the easiness of pages like Google.com. Just some thoughts on otherwise great work.

By: Aaswath

Aaswath — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 05:05:09 +0000

Oh hey, person, place and organizations! This reminds me of something Congrats Daniel!

By: Amy Grabowski

Amy Grabowski — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 20:31:39 +0000

Thanks for the mention and a terrific collaborative partner in Endeca! We’re encouraged by the reception of the beta and appreciate all feedback as we continue to refine the site (and work out the kinks) and refine Newssift into a useful business tool.

By: Daniel Lemire

Daniel Lemire — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 18:11:07 +0000

Nice!

By: Reverse Engineering NewsSift « NP-Harder

Reverse Engineering NewsSift « NP-Harder — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 15:37:49 +0000

[...] sentiment, in a way entirely analogous to what we do at Daylife (although only through our API). According to Daniel Tunkelang over at the Noisy Channel, the analysis is done by another firm. There are a few out there, [...]

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 13:14:56 +0000

At least he didn’t rip off a song from Joe Satriani.

By: ken

ken — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 12:59:49 +0000

Very nice, I’m impressed. Re Obama and negative sentiment, I had to laugh. I got some complaints from clients about Daylife’s sentiment algorithm and Obama coming out too negative. “How could this be? Everybody loves him. Something must be wrong with the algorithm”. Turns out, not everyone does. And with the economy in such a bad state, the negative sentiment tends to rub off on him, both for the algorithm and for humans.

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 12:47:48 +0000

Thanks for the feedback, both flattering and critical.

Joe, document-level sentiment is through a partner–we’re just aggregating across sets. As for the Obama coverage not being all that positive, it’s been getting increasingly negative over time. The sentiment analysis isn’t perfect–particularly in complex stories–but I think the trend reflect reality.

Mark, I like the Obama as Coldplay analogy. It’s not clear how best to handle a topic that has media saturation. And there’s room for improvement in a bunch of places, including the ones you cite. I’m glad these guys understand iterative delivery.

Steve, great to see you at The Noisy Channel! Yes, this was a long time coming, but worth the wait. And you’re right that the tech press did overlook the stickiness angle. But I can’t complain too much: it’s not everyday that an enterprise software company like Endeca makes it into TechCrunch, and the coverage was not only positive but informative.

By: Steve Gurney

Steve Gurney — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 11:22:13 +0000

Hi Daniel

It’s funny to see this, especially with the FT. I remember in 2004 Jesse etc building prototypes for FT.com to show them this type of functionality with Endeca and the potential it could bring. I’m glad they saw the light eventually.

I’m surprised that TechCrunch didn’t pick up on the effect this would have on advertising revenues. Exploratory search has a dramatic impact on page views.

Steve

By: MarkH

MarkH — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 09:26:43 +0000

Nice work.
Some initial thoughts from a brief look:

* Refering back to a previous post of yours – Obama is your Coldplay. He’s everywhere, suggesting the algo could do with some tweaks.

* Key themes are thrown-off by non-content parts of pages e.g. navigational text like “Related articles”. You need to work on determining content and a site’s “chrome”.

* I saw duplicate names in “Person” for the same person.

* When you show matches it would be useful to show highlight snippets – i.e. exactly where in the articles was Obama associated with Woolworths?

Don’t wish to seem too negative though. A nice job overall

By: Joe Cardillo

Joe Cardillo — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 05:39:17 +0000

Quote from Erik Schonfeld puts it nicely. Congrats, it’s a pretty neat launch and I can see it being useful in a variety of ways.

Any insight into how the sentiment measurement works? For example, looking at all of news articles on Reuters about Obama in a fixed time range, they are overwhelmingly negative and neutral, rarely positive. What types of criteria are used to make that judgement?

By: Christopher

Christopher — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 04:21:19 +0000

Don’t be too modest, it’s your initial hard work at the centre of this thing.

I’d be curious if FT Search agrees to hear about the system flow, a simple architecture overview of the components used to create the tool.

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 03:59:50 +0000

Thanks, guys! I wish I could take more credit for it–my role was fairly small. The site reflects a collaboration between Endeca and FT Search–which is basically a startup within the Financial Times. It’s been great working with them.

By: Jon

Jon — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 03:51:00 +0000

Wow — it looks fantastic. Incredibly rich exploratory experience. Congratulations.

By: Christopher

Christopher — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 01:03:18 +0000

Let me be the first to say congratulations.

The UI is a great example of the power of exploratory search. For doing research on specific news topics it’s going to add a lot.