Omgili blog

February 21, 2008

What is that? Another Omgili service?

Filed under: News, Omgili — ran @ 11:33 am

Today we released a service that complements Google’s search results. By using the Google@Omgili service, you get the best of two worlds – Objective Search (Google) combined with Subjective Search (Omgili). Other than searching on both search engines and getting more information about the search terms you entered, you also get discussions about Google’s search results. For example, if you are interested in learning more about Barack Obama, searching on Google@Omgili will return results from Google and Omgili, but also discussions about the links returned by Google, a deeper conversations linking to those results.

Searching for Barack Obama on Google@Omgili

I hope you enjoy our new service. Your feedback is always welcome.

Ran Geva,
Omgili CEO

February 13, 2008

Omgili’s “Even more advanced” Search features

Filed under: News — ran @ 9:27 am
We take pride in that we cover discussion based sites. Our mission doesn’t end there. In order to deliver the best results, it is not enough to limit our crawlers only to those sites that contain discussion based content. Our intelligent crawlers have the ability to “surgically” extract specific information from each discussion. May it be the Title, Topic and Replies, or the user name, posts dates and quotes/signature information. This is not an easy task when it comes to millions of forums, I can assure you. Since we have this information indexed, we decided to expose some of the advanced search capabilities that are specific to discussion search.

Searching between time frames

A discussion takes place over a time frame. It can start and end on the same day, or span over a period of time. Omgili recognizes the date of each post and determines that the discussion took place when it was most active. For example, a discussions might start at the 24th of July, but with most of its replies posted on the 26th. In this case, Omgili determines that the discussion took place at the 26th.
Using the from_date: and to_date: prefix you can search for discussions that took place only in a specific time frame. The date format is 4 digits for the year, followed by 2 digits for the month and 2 digits for the day. For example 24 of July 2007 would look like this: 20070724.
To search for discussions about “Microsoft Office” that took place between November 1st to November 5th 2007 you should do the following:

Microsoft Office from_date:20071101 to_date:20071105

Minimum number of replies

Each discussion is made out of a topic and replies. You can ask Omgili to return only discussions with a minimum number of replies. By doing so you can skip all the short discussions that you might not find interesting. Use the min_replies: prefix for this mission.
For example, to search for discussions about “Apple iPod” with a minimum number of 3 replies do the following:

Apple iPod min_replies:3

Minimum number of unique users

The people that participate in a discussions are the users. You can ask Omgili to return only discussions with a minimum number of users (different users) that participated. By doing so you can increase the diversity of the discussions in the results with more points of view. Use the min_users: prefix for this mission.
For example, to search for discussions about Linux with a minimum number of 3 different users do the following:

Linux min_users:3

Minimum number of engaged users

Not all the participants of a discussion contribute much information to it. A user that is engaged in a discussions, is a user that contributes at least 100 characters in at least one reply. You can ask Omgili to return only discussions with a minimum number of engaged users. By doing so you can increase the depth of the discussions you get, but also significantly limit the number of results. Use the min_engagement: prefix for this mission.
For example, to search for discussions about Apple with a minimum number of 3 engaged users do the following:

Apple min_engagement:3

I hope you found this information useful.

Thank you for reading,

Ran Geva
Omgili CEO

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