Infocious is a next-generation algorithmic search engine that helps you find information on the Web by:

1. performing linguistic analysis on the Web pages.
   In this way Infocious gains a better understanding of the content of the Web pages, and can return more relevant results. In addition, linguistic analysis makes possible a ton of other features that Infocious currently offers.
   [more on linguistic analysis]
2. organizing the information on the Web in categories.
   Oftentimes there are simply too many relevant results to browse through. Infocious groups the results in categories to help you find faster what you need.
   [more on categorization]
3. saving you time by showing you additional important topics within the results.
   Infocious gives you an idea of what important topics (called key phrases) are present within a Web page in addition to your query. This way you can avoid visiting Web pages only to discover that they were not what you wanted.
   [more on key phrases]
4. giving you more control over your search.
   In Infocious you can restrict your query within one or more particular categories. You can add a key phrase to your search to filter out irrelevant topics. If you are not familiar with the subject your are searching, try the related topics Infocious suggests. All within one click. The possibilities are endless ...
   [overview of features]

Typical search engines today return relevant results based on the content of the pages and the link structure on the Web. That is, in order for a Web page to be considered relevant to a particular query, the page has to contain the query keywords and has to be linked by other pages on the Web.

Infocious takes Web searching one step further: it is designed from scratch to be able to support fast and accurate natural language processing on the pages downloaded from the Web. This enables Infocious to better understand the context of the keywords within the Web pages and thus provide the users with more relevant results.

At the same time, the language processing that Infocious performs enables it to offer additional features to its users. For example Infocious can resolve ambiguities found within Web pages (e.g. the word report can be used as both a verb or noun, the word jaguar can refer to a car or the animal, etc.), categorize the Web pages and enable users to perform focused searches in order to get more relevant results.

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What is the technology behind Infocious?

In short, Infocious is the final product of extensive research in Web Search Engines and Natural Language Processing.

Infocious was developed from code-line zero with scalability, efficiency, extensibility and robustness in mind. Infocious is designed so that it can index linguistic information for every page on the Web and allow for more powerful and relevant searches.

The architecture of Infocious contains several components (please see our white papers for all the details).

At a high level, our crawler downloads pages from the Web and hands them off to our Linguistic Analysis algorithms that operate at crawler speed. The output is send out to various indexes developed specifically so that they can handle and store efficiently the specialized information generated by the Linguistic Analysis algorithms. These indexes are used during query time to answer the user's requests, organize the results in intuitive ways and present related topics, key phrases and suggestions.

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What is Linguistic Analysis?

Linguistic Analysis is the process of breaking down a document to extract the important concepts and meanings it contains. Infocious is built with the primary goal of improving the user search experience through linguistic analysis. Infocious applies linguistic analysis in two major ways:

1. Through language analysis Infocious can resolve ambiguities within the content of Web pages. Examples of ambiguities that Infocious can resolve are:
   • Part of speech ambiguity: This is the case when a word can be used with different roles in a sentence.
     For example the word "report" can be either a noun (a paper report) or a verb (want to report something). By being able to discriminate between this difference, Infocious allows you more control over the meaning of the keywords you are searching for. (try it: find reports about crime or report a crime)
   • Topical ambiguity: This is the case when a word can have multiple meanings. For example the word "jaguar" can either mean the car brand, the animal or a software. Infocious can tell between the difference in the meaning of such words and allows you to specify which meaning you are looking for. (try it: jaguar the car, jaguar the animal or jaguar the software, etc.),
2. Linguistic analysis also contributes to the ranking of the results that are presented to the user. At a high level, Infocious rates the coherence, or quality, of the text. This is used to improve the ranking of search results, by promoting well-written, content-rich documents while conversely demoting lower quality text.

Through its linguistic processing, Infocious gets a better sense of a document's content and its quality before returning them to you as search results. Also, many of the unique features that Infocious provides are either made possible (e.g. key phrases, disambiguation, etc.), improved upon (e.g. related topics, suggestions, etc.) or made more accurate (e.g. personalization, categorization) by this extra analysis.

If you would like to find out more about Langor^TM and the other advanced technologies Infocious uses, please send us an email at info@infocious.com.





Does Infocious rank pages based only on Linguistic Analysis?

No. Although our Linguistic Analysis algorithms are in the very core of our search engine and contribute a great deal to the final ranking of results, in order to ensure that we return results of the highest quality to our users we take a number of different metrics into account while ranking the results that we return to the users.

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What is Web page categorization?

Web page categorization is the process of assigning one or more categories (or topics) to the pages downloaded from the Web.

For every page that Infocious presents to the user after a query, it also shows the categories that the pages belong to.

This process provides our users the option to narrow their search results within particular categories (e.g., see only car-related pages about jaguar).
[more on Web page categorization]

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Does Infocious have its own crawler or is it a meta-search engine?

Infocious has its own crawler that visits web sites to collect information that we then feed to our language analysis processes, our categorizers, indexers, etc.

Our crawler follows hypertext links to discover and download Web pages, but it is also capable of downloading pages from the so-called Hidden (or Deep) Web (i.e. Web pages that are inside databases on the Web and are not accessible by simply following links). Our crawler's mission is to hunt down as much public accessible information as possible so we can make it available to you for searching.
[more on our crawler]

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What is the meaning of the name Infocious?

The word Infocious comes from the concatenation of two different words:
Information Delicious. The goal of Infocious is to make information manageable again by breaking it down into bite-sized morsels for you to enjoy!

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