Evri Inside
We have gotten lot’s of great feedback – positive and constructive – since we opened the beta up a last week. All of your feedback is helpful, even when critical. I thought it would help to give a little more background on what we are doing, and how we think you might get the most out of visiting and using Evri.com
We think one of the best ways to find us is when you get to us through existing content that has already implemented our content recommendation widgets. From here, you might explore with the widget, go read something else on the same or a related topic, or head directly to an Evri profile page.
When you reach an Evri profile page, our hope is that you see us as more of a browse engine than anything. We definitely aren’t, and aren’t trying to be, a search engine. Because of our methods, using natural language and focusing on the named entities in content (the proper nouns), we train and configure the system on specific subject areas. For that reason, our Find box only finds things for which we have a profile page. We don’t want to disappoint you by taking you to a dead-end “No Results” page. The subject areas we focused on first are Politics and Entertainment, so these are the areas you can expect we’ll have really good coverage. As a result, we have great pages about both major US figures (like presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain) and international ones like the new head of Israel’s Kadima Party, Tzipi Livni. We also do a good job on entertainment, from not-yet-released movies like Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, to classic movie stars like the recently departed and much-loved Paul Newman. We do have lots of coverage in other areas, but it’s not comprehensive…yet!
In coming months, we will add more coverage in Business, Technology, Sports, Health & Medicine, and others. What we definitely won’t have for a little while longer are many pages about non-proper nouns or “conceptual entities”. For example the term “Golden Retriever”, mentioned in an article, isn’t designed to work well in the current product. We think there is tremendous value in applying what we do to these types of subjects, and we will get there, but for right now we aren’t focusing on making this work. (Although, take a look at the UI at the bottom of this page for an example of what we get today for the subject “Bank Failure”.)
Another thing that is easy for our beta testers to sometimes miss is how much stuff we actually have. The key is the two-column grid that appears alongside the “Tinkertoy” relationship display. As an example, look at this section of the Angelina Jolie profile page. I have selected “Actor” in the left column of the “Top Articles” section. The results include a list of the Actors she is related to, with the top ten documents about these relationships listed below.
Selecting any of the actors in the in the right hand column will cause the documents and the media to change to reflect your choice. Here, I’ve selected Billy Bob Thornton:
With this UI you can browse a very large number of web documents without being overwhelmed by a new list of keyword-based search results at each step. If it looks like we don’t have everything that’s because we show the top ten results for each combination that you are browsing. And, coming full circle, that’s the idea: to encourage serendipitous discovery and browsing of web content about the things you are interested in. Where else could you browse from Angelina Jolie to Hamid Karzi in 2 clicks (the route goes through Jude Law)?
Please don’t forget to send us feedback - it really is appreciated.