Nstein Aims to Offer a 'New Kind of Site Search' With 3S

By Irina Guseva (@irina_guseva) Nov 18, 2009 Comments

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Semantic search has been the new black in the high fashion of content management and the industries around it. Nstein (news, site), a provider of Web CMS, DAM and text-mining technologies, just released a new product — which they say is more flexible, intuitive and extensible than Google Search Appliance — called Semantic Site Search, or the “new kind of site search,” as the vendor humbly refers to it.

We had a chance to get an early demo and talk to Eric Williams, Nstein’s product manager, who told us all about his "little baby" under the code-name 3S. It may be a newborn, but it comes with a strong featureset of multi-index federated search, embedded Text Mining Engine, semantic widgets and a more flexible presentation layer.

Search is Not Easy, or Can Google Save Us?

Let’s start with the fact that despite all the current technologies, search is still a pain. Despite all the tagging with keywords and metadata, we still don’t always get what we want — relevant results.

Nstein seemed to have put a lot of thought into this problem and came up with 3S (Semantic Site Search) that uses their proprietary search algorithms and their text-mining technology to raise to the challenge of actually finding the data users are looking for.

Not without a bit of rivalry, Nstein makes it a point to remind us that GSA lacks some of the features that they provide with 3S.

Some would probably agree that tweaking GSA algorithms and settings can be a daunting task with too many parameters out there, yet not much freedom to do modification or be able to build your own features on top of it (Unless, of course, you buy one of those Google’s own add-ons like “Did you mean…”).

How Nstein 3S Works

3S is a combination of multi-index federated search engine and a presentation framework (web app built on top of the engine). It also uses embedded Nstein TME for semantic facets.

3S indexes content from various content properties (blogs, CMS, websites). Then TME (read more about Nstein’s Text Mining Engine) applies its semantical analysis and categorization powers to enrich the data, annotate it and expose the underlying (semantical and metadatical) meanings of content.

Tweaking Algorithms

Using 3S, you can visually tweak results (starting with the proprietary algorithms that Nstein built) in a rather intuitive UI to get to the ultimate goal of getting relevant, faceted search results for your business requirements.

On top of that, 3S provides tools to embed advertising campaigns and add semantic widgets.

Semantic Widgets and Mashups

3S (they say, out of the box) comes with a widget server and several sample widget implementations. Widgets can be added to any of your web pages to display filtered relevant or related content from pretty much any source. Widgets are controlled by the Widget server and widget themes are then applied in this case.

Nstein 3S Sample Widget

Themes are not difficult to create on your own, according to Nstein, which means more extensive widgets can be created by just stripping down a theme on the presentation framework. In most cases, it’s not more than a line of code:

3s code snippet.png
Code Snippet: Just One Line of Code

You can also potentially plug in widgets into external blogs, for example, invoking widget server remotely, which will make it build a cross-linking widget.
It can get even more interesting if you use widgets in a combination with the Template Engine to build search-based mashups based on various contents across different properties.

Themes and the Template Engine

3S comes with several themes that can be used for both controlling the presentation of your search results page. When search results are sent to the presentation framework, the themes are applied and you get a final web page as a result.