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| Google Labs and Overture Research: A Brief Comparative Study August 30, 2003 Company financials and stock markets performances of individual companies in a market segment are usually a good barometer to measure the health of a market segment, but an equally significant barometer is the amount of research an industry spawns - in house as well as university and academic research, and how much money companies are ready to put into research and development activities. Internet search (web information retrieval) is the one segment where research has been the bed-rock of the industry growth. In this light this trend, it would interesting to compare the research outfits of two leaders in the internet search space: Google Labs and Overture Research . Overture recently increased the buzz around its research outfit Overture Research directly competing with Google Labs. Many are surprised by this buzz - as until now Overture with its emphasis on "paid inclusion" was almost regarded as the spirit of free, unmanipulated internet web information retrieval and search. So for many in the research fraternity what companies like Overture and Inktomi were doing was against the research trends - ironically with Yahoo's acquisition of Inktomi now Overture and Inktomi are part of the same stable. Against this backdrop, let us now examine and compare the key offerings of both of these labs. Overture Research: Key Offerings Overture on its new site has categorized the research offerings under the following categories:
These research offerings include open source based peer-to-peer searching in the form of Nutch to information visualization, information clustering and grouping the research results into concept-based and localized search buckets. One key highlight of the other research that Overture Research staff is working on is the very popular study on opinion mining and semantic-based information mining . Google Labs: Key Offerings Google Labs need no introduction, but here are the key offerings:
Again in terms web information retrieval terms, Google Labs cover themes ranging from information discovery (Glossary, Webquotes, News Alerts), peer-to-peer search(Google Computer), information access and visualization (Google Viewer, Voice Search, Keyboard Shortcuts) to information clustering (Google Sets). Google on this very popular site, lists the various projects Google engineers are working - giving us a glimpse into the future direction of this company. Google Labs and Overture Labs: A Comparison Both the companies have their pluses and minuses, but it will be fair to say - judging purely from the information that is publicly available - that Overture lags a way behind in many areas. Google definitely un upper hand in terms of specific information discovery Glossary and Webquotes and in the area lexico-semantic clustering (Google Sets). And it is also interesting to note what is called "Concept Discovery" by Overture Research is already available through Google main-stream search (Google Zeitgeist, "In the News" and "Related" from Google News Search and "Similar Pages" Search). But having said that Overture scores points in the areas of information visualization (Cluster Graphing) and localized search. All in all, Google Labs and Overture Labs are good hang-outs to watch for the trends in web information retrieval and search technologies. |
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