It has been a little over a year since we launched Infoaxe, to make it easy for users to Search their Web History from anywhere, without going through the hassle of bookmarking & tagging.
We wanted to give a shout-out to some of the blog posts you, our users wrote about Infoaxe and how you have been finding the service helpful. Thanks for recommending us to your friends & readers. We have some exciting new features lined up this year which we hope you enjoy and let you get even more out of Infoaxe
With Infoaxe's Real Time Search you ask the question, 'What's popular now for X?' (where X is your search query).
For eg. if you search for 'iphone review', Google shows a review of the first generation iphone from 2007 which is irrelevant now. Infoaxe on the other hand, shows a review of the iphone 3GS which is what is relevant NOW for such a query.
Infoaxe's real-time search engine works by analyzing the aggregate attention data collected by our Web History Search Engine with over 2.5 million users. We know what the world is looking at NOW and leverage that data to figure out the most timely and relevant results for queries. Infoaxe's ranking algorithms use signals derived from this aggregate browsing data to provide a real-time view of the Web for searchers. Instead of merely sorting results by time, Infoaxe's algorithms use freshness as a signal alongside several other relevance signals to provide relevant results. We think the best result for a query is one that is as fresh as possible but not fresher ;P. We think Einstein would agree ;).
Infoaxe does particularly well for queries relating to Shopping, deals, movies/sitcoms/ebooks etc. Check it out here and let us know what you think! This is just our first step out the door. We are constantly tuning our ranking our indexing algorithms so expect search quality to keep improving!
I was having a conversation recently with Vijay Krishnan, my co-founder at Infoaxe about autonomous cars. This had always been a pet fancy of mine (and which also began my love affair with A.I) and I was recently reminded of my strong feelings on the subject after I had an accident on 101 where I ended up totaling my car.
I ended up rear ending a car that had suddenly stopped due to traffic. I felt that in this case, a human had been placed inside of a loop that he did not belong in. Obviously, humans should be removed out of all mission critical loops. (We do this at Infoaxe all the time ;) I believe human intelligence is best applied to creating more & more loops that we can get ourselves out of completely. It is the topic of another post as to whether its possible to get ourselves out of that meta-loop altogether ;P) In this case, the car should have had sensors in the front constantly tracking distance to the car in front with appropriate visual warnings when there is a violation. Most importantly the car should automatically apply the brakes when the distance between the cars is closed at an abnormal speed. Never ever rely on humans to react in time!
I have been really impressed with progress that folks have been making with autonomous driving especially with the Darpa Grand Challenge. There have been 3 of them so far, with the last event in '07. Check out the video below for some early practice runs by Junior of the Stanford Racing Team.
As Thrun remarks in the video ~42,000/yr die in the US due to car accidents and most of these are due to human error.
For the geeks, Junior perceives the environment through a combination of Lidars & video cameras. Here's an article from CNET with some more photos under the hood of Junior. And one more here with some fun facts about the plethora of sensors used.
Vijay Krishnan and I have been working on Infoaxe for a while now and we are happy to be releasing an alpha version of our search engine to the public.
Watch the quick Infoaxe Demo Video below,
Infoaxe (http://www.infoaxe.com), is a Personal Browsing History Search Engine. With Infoaxe every page that you visit on the Internet gets added to a collection called your Personal Web Memory and infoaxe makes this collection, searchable across all the computers you use. Thanks to Infoaxe, there is no need to ever bookmark a page again. It makes getting back to web pages seen in the past (like videos, news articles etc) extremely fast and easy. Infoaxe also lets you 'pivot' around web pages seen in the past to see other pages that you visited at the same time. Tagging and sharing pages from your web memory with your friends is also very convenient with Infoaxe.
We have been receiving rave reviews from our existing users and hope you find Infoaxe compelling as well and join the growing number of happy Infoaxe users! Why Infoaxe? The Infoaxe story began when Vijay and I were graduate students in Computer Science at Stanford, as a result of the increasing problem we faced, of being able to keep track of interesting and useful information on the Web. The Web is growing rapidly and it is rapidly outgrowing the tools we are using to keep track of the Web (bookmarks, emailing links to yourself etc). Infoaxe is the next big step in this regard. We wanted to make it extremely easy for web users to keep track of their personal slice of the Web. What is Infoaxe? Infoaxe is a search engine for your web memory. Every page that you see on the Web gets added to your personal Web Memory and is now searchable. Your Web memory is private to you and portable (can be accessed across any computer that you use). You never have to bookmark a page again! (everything gets implicitly bookmarked and becomes searchable) What should I do to get started? V. Simple. Sign up for Infoaxe and install the infoaxe toolbar. The toolbar sends the urls to be added to your personal web memory so its necessary to install the toolbar on all computers you use.
Go to http://www.infoaxe.com and watch the quick demo video. Check out the FAQ as well, which should answer most of your questions.
Here are some cool things you can do with your Web Memory at your finger tips,
* Your web history synchronized, searchable and portable across all computers and browsers you use. Take it wherever you go!
* Pivot on events: Say, you wanted to look at all the websites you looked at when you were researching grad schools many months ago. This sounds almost impossible to accomplish with a general Web Search Engine like Google. The right query is quite hard in this case since there likely isn't one single query which will give you all the pages. You might have looked at other grad schools like MIT, CMU etc, tips for writing good grad school essays etc. infoaxe helps you here by letting you pivot around a Web page in your Web Memory. Think of this as something like time travel. You can ask infoaxe to show you all the web pages you were looking at when you were looking at the Stanford University Graduate Admissions home page. We think its more natural to remember events than dates, and pivot lets you pivot around events in your Web Memory.
* Many of our users tell us that thanks to infoaxe, their search queries to Google have become a lot shorter. For eg. these days to go to the website of the restaurant Siam Royal in Palo Alto, I no longer need to type " siam royal palo alto" to Google. I just type "siam royal".(That's a lie, I actually just type "siam" :) )With of our convenient Google widget, searching on Google.com displays infoaxe web memory results on the vacant right column of the Google search results page.
* Here is another example, Mary is hunting for apartments in Palo Alto. She has looked at many apartments on craigslist and rent.com. She is finding it impossible to keep track of the ones she liked. Bookmarking seems like a lot of work for so many pages and an overkill since she is sure that after this week she wouldn't really be looking at these apartments again. Mary does not have to bookmark anything. If she wanted to revisit all the apartments she looked at on University Avenue, she could just search infoaxe with the query 'university avenue'.
* Tagging - add labels to saved web pages to help organize them better.
Again, Check out our FAQ for answers to more questions.
Infoaxe is still very young and we have many more exciting features in the offing that we will be releasing over the next couple of months. So sign up, download the infoaxe toolbar and we hope you find it useful!
If you like Infoaxe, do tell your friends about it! You can also become a fan of Infoaxe on facebook (search for infoaxe on facebook and join the growing infoaxe community). The Big Picture: The Infoaxe Vision In a user's Web Memory there is enormous knowledge and experience, very similar to what you would find with an avid book reader. Infoaxe connects a user with her Web Memory so that she can better reuse and tap into her Web experience. Think of it as your very own Bookcase for the Web where you have access to a copy of every page that you ever saw on the Web.
We also believe that if we connect you to your Web Memory and allow you to derive value from it, there is also an interesting side effect which is that your friends benefit!
Here is an example: Ann: Hey do you think I should get the iPhone or the Google Phone? Mark: Hmmm...tough call..but hey I remember this great review that I read a while back which compared the two and gave some great insights.. Ann: Do you think you can dig up that review again? Mark: No prob...I use Infoaxe!! I can refind it in no time from my Web Memory.
I have some BIG news in this post. I have just started my company, Infoaxe along with my long time friend and classmate from Stanford, Vijay Krishnan.
Infoaxe is the next generation search engine searching a very different kind of Web. We are in stealth mode currently and hence my lips are sealed. But stay tuned for updates. Infoaxe is short for 'Information Access' with some liberties taken :) It could also be a reference to the Stanford Axe ;).
We developed the Infoaxe Search Engine while we were graduate students at Stanford. We are very excited to have Prof. Hector Garcia Molina on our technical advisory board.
We are really excited about Infoaxe which has at its core many innovations in applications of data mining and machine learning.
Jonathan Siddharth's musings on Search, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Math and Computer Science in general with the occasional completely random post.
I am Co-founder of Infoaxe, a Search Engine that lets users organize, manage & search through the full text of their web browsing history across browsers & computers. Never forget a webpage again!
Prior to Infoaxe, I was a Graduate student in computer Science at Stanford University working on problems in ranking/search relevance. My research thesis at Stanford was SpotSigs: A near duplicate detection algorithm for deduping Web Scale Collections. I was a Scientist at Powerset where I co-designed the ranking function for the Natural Language Search Engine. Powerset was acquired by Microsoft for ~$100M in early '08.
