Twing
Twing.com was a search engine specializing in internet forum content, located in Jersey City, New Jersey, with data centers around the world. Twing used vertical searching as a forum search service that seeks out communities based on common forum formats. The product disappeared from the Web in late November, 2008, when the product division's parent company Accoona ceased business operations.
Twing did not use the typical web crawler method but recognizes the footprint and structure of forum content and indexes such content according to its context, and then allows for word sense disambiguation of concepts through use of topical category and other filters.
Content disambiguation
To allow for disambiguation, Twing is utilizing interface concepts such as Faceted Search and Filtering in the Search Engine Result Pages, (SERPs). These are advanced search methods [1] that attempt to assist users with their information foraging efforts by keeping them on an information scent trail. [2]
Category filters, based on the directory taxonomy, are one of the filtering methods available. This is an attempt to solve the generalized search problem of ambiguity that often occurs in search results as well as forum search results. A good example might be the word "bass." If you do a search for bass on Wikipedia, you get a disambiguation page to determine if the phrase in this case means a musical instrument, a company name, part of a place name, a beverage, and other options. While adding key terms to a search may sometimes collapse ambiguities, doing so can also exclude things of value. So category filters can help solve the problem of ambiguity in search engine results, whether such search engines are forum search specific or not. Additional filters are available based on language entity extraction from content and proprietary algorithms and dictionaries. Twing's use of such technology is discernible from seeing the filters available within the search results pages.
Forum content collection
The Twing robot, (called Twingbot), was designed to understand the formats of Internet Forums, (a.k.a. Bulletin Boards or Discussion Groups.) While the Twing product was open to the world in January, 2008, the Twingbot robot had been observed 'in the wild' at least several months earlier. (The Twingbot robot had identified itself as User-Agent: Twingbot/1.0 and formerly had its own descriptive web page at www.twingbot.com/)
See also
References
- ↑ Turbek, Stephen (2008-01-16). "Advancing Advanced Search". bozesandarrows. http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/advancing-advanced. Retrieved 2008-02-01.
- ↑ Pirolli, Peter (2007). Information Foraging Theory. Adaptive Interaction with Information. Oxford. ISBN 978-0-19-517332-1.
External links
- Some Historical Screen Shots of Twing Community Search Product from November, 2008 prior to closing of parent company Accoona
- PC Magazine Search Without Google Part II Page 1 and Part II Page 2
- Twing Forum Search / Directory
- ABC News: Ahead of the Curve
- AppScout: Twing - Search Forums and Discover Communities
- Mashable: Twing Buzz Graphs
- Red Ferret Journal March 11, 2008 Article
- SEO Roundtable: Search SEO Forums and More with Twing
- Tech2All: Twing - The Forum Search Engine
- About Buzz Reputation Tracking in Forums
- Twing: Searching the Deep Web
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