“3S is a front-end, multi-index search engine designed to provide users an unparalleled search experience,” said Nstein CTO Jean-Michel Texier. 3S leverages Nstein's patented text-mining technology to power a faceted site search which returns highly accurate results that are organised categorically.
“Standard, statistical site search often doesn't give users the results they are looking for,” continued Texier. “Matching simple keywords against hundreds of thousands of documents sometimes returns a lot of irrelevant results. 3S provides an entirely different experience.”
3S can ingest content from many different indices from many different web publishing platforms, meaning it indexes material across multiple properties. It then applies Nstein's patented semantic enrichment process to it. 3S' embedded Text Mining Engine (TME) identifies concepts, categories, proper names, places, organizations, sentiment and topics in particular content pieces and then annotates those documents, creating a semantic fingerprint that exposes underlying nuances and meaning in content.
“When a user submits a search query to 3S,” said Texier, “they are returned highly accurate, faceted results organized by topics and entities. This has the effect of offering users very relevant related content, ensuring that they not only find what they're looking for but also discover other valuable content.”
“It's remarkable, how flexible 3S is,” said Matthieu Delorme, CTO at Gesca Digital, Nstein's first 3S client. “Not only can we tweak the search sensitivity on-the-fly, we can also control content placement and even ad placement. If we want to push a certain piece, 3S makes certain the right users find it.”
Gesca Digital expects to make full use of 3S' out of the box capability to deploy topical microsites. “One of the most exciting features of 3S is that it allows administrators to create topical microsites or mashup sites as easily as inputting searches,” said Delorme. “It's amazing. You input a search or a combination of searches across your properties and channel the results into an RSS-ready template for a topical microsite, just like that. One can really create new content-properties with just a few clicks.”
“It has been a pleasure to work with Gesca Digital on this,” said Texier. “The implementation was quick and easy and now they are customizing the tool to make it their own. That is what we wanted. A tool that conformed to all best-practice web standards that was also very easy to implement and customize and had a low cost of ownership.”
3S is also highly configurable and customizable. It boasts a visual interface that allows administrators to tweak search sensitivity algorithms without having to modify hard code. “We wanted to allow administrators to experiment with tweaking and customizing search algorithms on-the-fly, without digging deep into code,” said Texier. We created a slider-based interface that modifies search results between sets of sensitivities, more recent vs. more relevant, for example. This allows administrators to push the content they want to push.”
3S comes bundled with front-end widgets designed to improve the search experience. Widgets can be used to point users to “similar content”, “most recent content”, or virtually any other identifying characteristic of content that one wants to promote. Using widgets and the powerful templating engine, integrators can quickly build complex search-based mashups, across indices.
“Ultimately, 3S is more than just a perfect companion for our web-publishing platform WCM,” concluded Texier, “Its embedded architecture and built-in crawler mean it's ready to deploy, to index and search any web property, no matter how much content there is. We're really quite proud of the teamwork that went into developing 3S.”
About Gesca
Gesca says: “Gesca Ltée, a subsidiary company of Power Corporation of Canada, is a pioneer in French language news in Quebec. The company's holdings include seven major French language newspapers, television programming, specialty magazines and books, and the largest Francophone virtual newsroom in North America, www.cyberpresse.ca.”
About Nstein Technologies Inc
Nstein says: “Nstein Technologies provides next generation content management solutions that help information-rich enterprises centralize, understand and manage vast amounts of content. At the heart of Nstein's solutions, semantic analysis allows information to be easily found and packaged together – so it can be connected to the right internal and external audiences. Nstein's Content Management and Web Publishing solutions both rely on Nstein's patented Text Mining Engine for semantic & text analysis. This unlocks content's value and allows clients (from an array of different industries) to leverage existing content to: create and deliver new products; facilitate internal and external research and knowledge sharing; and reduce content-related costs.”
