Friday, September 30, 2005

Macro Content Relevance

Michael Ajose wrote on 13 September 2004:

One major weakness is the frequent inaccuracy of search results. Queries
for specific information tend to return either a minority of relevant documents
interspersed between an overwhelming majority of irrelevant results or no
relevant results at all. … New, more accurate methods of information retrieval
are urgently required.

This example shows that when people talk about relevance they are talking about Macro-Content relevance. Macro-Content is almost always a mixture of relevant and irrelevant content. When you're looking for a monkey in a certain zoo you usually get many other animals and many other zoos.

But the internet is currently reshaping the size of its units from big units (Web 1.0) into small units (Web 2.0) like:

  • News
  • Headlines
  • Links
  • Pictures
  • Blogs
  • SMS messages
  • Comments
  • Descriptions
  • Reviews
  • Announcement of events
  • Recipes
  • Interesting sites
  • Sport records
  • Recommended books
  • Places to visit,
  • Podcasting
  • Mp3


Everybody is talking about Macro-Content relevance, and yet nobody talks about Micro content's relevance.

Why?

Maybe because there is not enough experience with micro content engines [like QTSaver].
One thing is for sure: In Web 2.0 the mixture of relevant and irrelevant items on the same result page evaporates.


Micro-Contents are either relevant or not.






Thursday, September 29, 2005

Interesting Piece of Reading

Finding friends and foes on Site Meter is a new possibility.
How did webmasters live so long without it?

Yesterday morning I found out that a visitor from Washington who used Macintosh spent 9 minutes and 48 seconds on viewing 16 pages after entering the key word TheConcept into Google's BlogSearch.

I guess it was someone from Mesa Dynamics, the company that owns theConcept, since they reside in Washington D.C. and since their search tool works only on Macintosh.

Then I thought that if my guess is true what a surprise it must have been for them to find out that not only QTSaver is their competitor but also Orion and Surfnotes.

I'm sure that for them reading what they would define as my secrets was the most interesting piece of reading. This is what happens when reading becomes personal, greedy and emotional.

I know - it happened to me when I found out about my competitors...

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

microcontent engine


This is the latest version of QTSaver's logo.

Earlier versions were: "QTSaver research tool", "QTSaver search tool" "QTSaver microcontent aggregator".

Each version had its own logic.
"Rresearch tool" was too specific. It addressed only the researchers.
"Search tool" was too common, there are too many search tools all around us.
"Microcontent aggregator" was too complicated.
Each version was sent to our loyal users to get their reaction.

And still it is not clear whether this version will hold for ever...

Tuesday, September 27, 2005

First Bug

Yesterday I got my first bug-report:

-I click on the search button and nothing happens
-Well, can you please send me the names of your Operating System and browser?

The next Email was headed "QT solver"

I found the problem! If I use Internet Explorer as my browser it works fine.
It's when I use Mozilla Firefox as my browser that the search does not work.
These days, many people are using Firefox as an alternative browser due to its
user friendliness as well as its security.

He solved his problem but I still have to fix the bug.
My site Meter tells me that 20% of the visitors used Firefox 1.x browser – so how come all the others didn't complain about this bug?
Anyhow it is a historic moment in QTsaver's growing-up-story, and thanks for the feedback.

Monday, September 26, 2005

One Right Result

These days I'm busy telling the visually impaired community the herald about QTSaver.
It's no wonder that I came across David Faucheux's article


Is There a Place for Us? Toward the Full Inclusion of Blind and Other Librarians
with Disabilities.


David Faucheux is a blind librarian who was fully accepted into the library community and his life story is an inspiration for every human being who faces hardships. He's also a blogger.

I wanted to invite him to use QTSaver and I found his email address (biblioholik@earthlink.net ) at the end of his article. The email came back. So I entered his name with the word "mail" into QTSaver and got only one answer – but it was his new Email address.


Later I found out that the right Email was right after the wrong one in the article. It seems that I was so impatient that I grabbed the first result, but any how it's very satisfying to get one right result instead of a long list of links that leads you to many right results.
See the photo on http://www.flickr.com/photos/zeevveez/46684711/

Sunday, September 25, 2005

Herald to the visually impaired population

On the site of VirTouch Mouse for the blind I found the following information
The visually impaired population in the U.S., Japan and Europe is some 17
million people, of whom 535,000 in America alone, and about the same number in
Europe, are active computer users. Additionally, there are worldwide over 5,000
specific centers for the blind and over 50,000 general centers that serve the
blind. Among the latter are libraries, regular schools, museums, and
universities.

For me these are not numbers, in my imagination I can hear the joy of one such visually impaired user telling me about a successful search.

Anyhow, I need to pass the message out. I joined a few discussion groups of visually impaired and I'm sending letters to "Blindness Organizations".

QTSaver is software that might help you get less irrelevant information while
you are surfing the Web. It is very meaningful both for those who need text to
speech and for those who need Magnifier. With QTSaver you have to read or hear
fewer words and the words you read or hear are more to the point.

I am very impatient; I can't wait to hear that sweet voice of joy telling me that QTSaver is effective.

Saturday, September 24, 2005

About Me

Two months ago I wrote a comment to a newspaper article about the relevance of QTSaver and got an email from a reader who is a computer expert. He wanted to try QTSaver out. I sent him the passwords (it was before QTSaver became Beta) and didn't hear from him. Today he sent me another email telling me that he uses QTSaver a lot and added:

Can you tell me a little bit about your initiative and its correlation to
your background? Are you a businessman and this is your main occupation or is it
a free time hobby?
I retired two years ago, I replied, and since
then I'm writing feature film scripts.
I taught myself Microsoft Access and made the first draft of QTSaver. Then
I gave this clumsy draft to my partner Oni. Oni contacted very capable
programmers and they improved Qtsaver by highly sophisticated algorithms, and
made the data available through SMS and regular phone, so that now it's hard to
recognize my part in it.

The next day I got the following reply from this computer expert:

Great to hear that a hobby can lead to something so profound and
professional...


I love to read warm words about QTSaver, especially when they come from an
expert.


Friday, September 23, 2005

Analyzing My Visitor Counter



Analyzing my visitor's counter I found the following categories:


1. Visitors that really want to know about QTSaver.
2. Visitors that are not interested in QTSaver what so ever.

The first category includes me, which means that my visits change the results of the Page Views and the Visit Length upwards.

The second category includes:
A. Squinters
B. Spammers
C. Web crawlers
D. Mistakes

Squinters: those who are interested in another subject (not QTSaver). For example: On August 18 I published a post about CruiseFlorida. Five people commented to this post, but what's more interesting is that according to Site Meter dozens [!] read this post. I assume that none of them were interested in QTSaver what so ever. Another example: a visitor who was interested in Air Pollution which, for me, was only a demonstration of QTsaver's quality.


Spammers leave you a compliment and a link to their business. I delete their comments when I have the time.


Web crawlers are hard to spot on Site Meter but I know that my posts are published on few search engines and Blog Readers. I just don't know how to recognize them on Site Meter.


Mistakes: Today I found on Site Meter a visitor who looked for GTK-Qt Theme Engine. He stumbled on my Blog because the words QT and Engine appeared on his Query.

Any how, Site Meter gives me the pleasures of detecting – and for free…

Collector of Visions

Examining search results for the word "QTSaver" on Yahoo I came across Chris Wine's Blog.

Chris Wine put on his homepage a link to my post about my vision about the free Web School.

I saw that above this link Chris put Dave Pollards' link about his How to Save the World vision.
So I guess Chris is a collector of visions and it sounds to me like a cool occupation.

Since he didn't live a comment on my post I use this opportunity to thank him.

Thanks Chris- I'm really flattered…

Thursday, September 22, 2005

A letter to the European Blind Union

Today I sent this letter to the European Blind Union

I invented software that might help blinds all over the world to hear less
irrelevant information while they are surfing the Web. This software is tested
currently by the association for the blind students in the Hebrew University in
Jerusalem Isarael and recreives good feedback. In order to persuade
investors I need data about governmental budgets for helping the blinds in
Europe in general and specifically about helping blind students in Europe. I'll
appreciate any other data that you thing might help.

Thanks,

How to Save the World

Dear Dave,

I read the following on your How to Save the World deep and extensive article:

"
Chapter Four: In My Own Words: The Role of Innovation in Achieving Change - One
of my roles in the company I work for is Director of Knowledge Innovation.
To fulfill this role I had to discover what innovation is, at least in a
business context, how it occurs and why it's important".

This sentence specifically and the whole article in general triggered me to share with you my insight that the atoms of thought are micro contents which each one of us tries to arrange a little bit differently. I estimate that in the future some of your assumptions about how the world is built and how to change it or save it will also change…what will remain? Only the structure of thought… It is like copying a table in Microsoft Access when the prompt asks you whether you want to copy the table with the Data or to copy only the structure of the table.

I invite you to check out Qtsaver which was built on this insight.
But even if Qtsaver will eventually change the world – it will change only the data – not the structure…

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

DIGG

I just submitted a story about QTsaver to Digg.
This is a Web 2.0 new concept of a newpaper in which each reader becomes the editor who decides what's in and what's not.

Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking,
blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit
stories for review, but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go
on the homepage, the users do.

Cool!

Yahoo My Web Beta

Today I downloaded Yahoo My Web Beta toolbar to my desktop. I entered the word "QTSaver", got my results, and started tagging them. My first impression was enthusiasm, so I decided to make Yahoo My Web Beta my home page for a while, until I'll learn how to make the most out of it.

After I cooled down I thought that Furl and Blinklist and RSS readers like Rojo will loose me and a lot of others like me as clients since Yahoo My Web Beta does more or less what they do, but under the same roof.

Also I estimate that more people will move their homepage from Google to Yahoo My Web Beta, so that in the near future Google will have to present a similar tool, and even a better one.

Still there are features that I miss in Yahoo My Web:
I want to tag all the results' from one query as a batch (like in Flickr). For example I want to tag in one click all my Blog posts that Yahoo retrieves as "Blog".
In furl I can store a results' page from QTSaver but in Yahoo My Web I can't.

Anyhow Yahoo My Web Beta is another new Web 2.0 tool and I feel that Web 2.0 is on its way to conquer the world. Each day more and more people understand its usefulness. Since Qtsaver is a Web 2.0 tool it has now more chances to succeed.

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Duplicates on the Web

There's a huge amount of Web pages – but how many of them are duplicates?
We keep on hearing about billions of pages - but how many of them are unique?

Suddenly I realized that QTsaver's presence on the web has grown considerably.
Looking at the pages more closely I saw that some of the links contained duplicate contents.
Eventually I understood that this system of RSS FEEDS is bringing the message to more people than I expected. For example, my letter to the editor of NewForge appeared simultaneously on the following sites
http://japan.linux.com/
http://www.linux-magazin.ro/
Lampgroup
http://digitalmagi.com/
cissrv3.uwsp.edu/wdmd/resources.php
feeds2read.net/rssview-75.html

These sites change their whole content in a few hours, so that the post was there for only a short while, but since the Web remembers everything these duplicates will go on living for ever in the CASHE…

Monday, September 19, 2005

Site Meter

Site Meter is a great tool for tracking traffic on a Web site.

Each week I count the visitors to see if there is a sudden change in their regular number.
For example, taking off the passwords and going on Beta brought many more visitors to my site.

I use mostly the section called Recent Visitors by Referrals which enables me sometimes to track back a blogger and to thank him for visiting my site. Today I saw a referral from Claude Rains Appreciation Society which supports students' future work in Film Studies. I guess somebody visited his site and clicked on the random Blog button which brought him to my site...

I like the Location Tracking by countries – it makes me feel international…

Sunday, September 18, 2005

Keep It Simple

This is the fifth draft of QTsaver's new interface.
It's a long way till I'll be satisfied.
I'm not a professional designer but in this pace I'll soon be...

There are so many resolutions to make:
Each element can be on the right or on the left or on the middle, and there are so many kinds of fonts and colors.

I intend to keep it simple but I added fireworks on the top left corner.

Why?

Because if you have the best potatoes in the market and nobody comes to buy them - you've got to shout!

Saturday, September 17, 2005

NewsForge

This is my first publicity on e-newspaper.

I sent a letter to the editor prompting him to check out Qtsaver but I didn't expect him to publish the letter entirely as he did.

The big question is how many new users of Qtsaver NewsForge will bring.
No one is also an acceptable answer...

Friday, September 16, 2005

Why There Are No Blind People on the Internet

I admire surprising people who prove to the world and to themselves that they find a way where nobody thought there is one. People like Gidi Ahronovich, a blind young musician who built a Web site. Isn't that something?


Gidi writes:
Even today, most people believe that blindness is something terrible and
impossible to live with, and have difficulties dealing with blind people who try
to blend in society.


I asked Gidi to try QTSaver out and give me his feedback and he agreed willingly. I already wrote that

I think QTSaver can be great for blind and visually impaired users, since it
retrieves less text and the text is more to the point than in other
alternatives.

Now I'm waiting to see how this surprising man will surprise me.

Thursday, September 15, 2005

Interface

Now that QTSaver is a beta I feel as if I invited guests to my house while the house isn't ready to receive them.

So the next step will be improving the concept and the design of the interface.

I like what Ted Nelson said about it:


A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency
can
understand it within ten seconds.

I guess a satisfying user interface should include only the search button, but since QTSaver is not a search engine the name of the button will be something else…

Beta

Here's how Wondiring announced that QTSaver Goes Live

Here's
Zeev's post on the launch of QTSaver beta
. It's a cool microcontent engine
that's well worth a spin.


I like their clear way of saying the right things.
It is much better than what I did yesterday trying to soften the expected criticism with a lot of words.
Any how now it is clear – QTSaver is a beta.

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Getting Better All the Time

Now that QTSaver is released from the bonds of passwords I started a publicity campaign which will cost me only time and energy.

I was busy all day long sending e-newspapers editors (like BetaNews Ziff Davis distrowatch slashdot SourceForge Wired: Tech etc.) invitations to take a look at QTSaver and to send me their feedback.

Right after I finished this I got a note that the address of QTSaver is from now on
http://qtsaver.dynalias.com/

This is an exciting stage in the life of our software. Like a baby that starts to crawl, and grows a new teeth QTSaver is Getting Better All the Time.

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

Big Day

Until now QTSaver was protected with passwords.
From now on you are invited to try it out. It's on

http://experiment.dynalias.com/search4/

Your feedback and comments will shape the future development.

In the next few years I believe we'll all find that microcontent is what it's all about.

QTsaver - how did I miss it

This is what BroadProspect wrote about QTSaver:

QTsaver - how did I miss it

as a result of my post regarding the Orion new search method, I came a
cross a tool QTsaver,
I actually contacted the owner of the blog and the inventor of the tool and
found out that this tool already exist for a few years now, he let me use this
and I must say that I really enjoy it and think that there is a lot in it.

As it seems, micro content aggregation tools are great for people who are doing
research a specific subject, IMO, they do not serve the user who wishes to buy a
specific widget and is looking for a good place to do it, for this the regular
SERP or even better, a shopping engine will be a much better research job. both
way of searching, or actually I should say displaying results serve a specific
need, I guess that it is up to the tools providers to educate the right audience
what is the best tool for them.

Blogo

playing with QTSaver logo I came up with this result:



But it came out too close to the logo of Quick Time:


So I changed it to this:

The nick name of QTSaver is QT (cutie!)

Monday, September 12, 2005

Honor Thy Supporters


I got this photograph from my friend Aran.
He took it 30 years ago when he was preparing himself to become a documentary film director.
Immediately I felt that this photograph expresses something deep inside me, but I didn't find the words to describe it.

Today i found these hidden words and I want to dedicate them to all my Great Supporters:

YOU'VE LEFT YOUR FOOT PRINTS ON MY SAND

Sunday, September 11, 2005

The More the Merrier

Following a pointer in BroadProspect's Blog I came across another company that is making micro-content aggregation - surfnotes, which was founded in October 1998 by Scott Hirsch in Jerusalem, Israel


Surfnotes scans Web pages using a patent-pending algorithm that matches
information to a template called an Intelligent Display Template. IDTs
cover ten categories to date, including business and sports. When you enter a
query, Surfnotes first searches according to category, then for the required
data. If you use Surfnotes, you get only relevant data, such as a sentence that indicates exactly what the earnings were, the name of the company, and the name of the chief executive officer
.

A week ago I thought QTSaver is the only player in this field but now we have also TheConcept, Orion and Surfnotes.

The more the merrier…

Saturday, September 10, 2005

Interim Summing Up

I just got this comment from BroadProspect:

The QTSaver sounds interesting; I really want to try it out. I talked about the
concept in my Blog
http://www.searchenginesmarketingblog.com/2005/09/10/new-search-engine-revolutionary/

This is the first comment that was triggered by my Blog (I don't count Allen Searls' interest in QTSaver since this relationship was initiated by an e-mail I wrote him).

After a month or so my Blog hosted 400 visitors (including about ten spammers)
The exposure is even higher if I count Blog readers like Rojo, technorati, del.icio.us , feedster, etc. that copy every post I upload and publish it to their readers.

This is much more than I expected because I already built a site for a documentary film director and it had only twice the amount of my Blog visitors in a whole year.

This is my Blog's measurable Interim Summing Up.

But how do you measure the fun?

Group Browsing

Web browsing, like most of today's desktop applications, is usually a solitary
activity. Other forms of media, such as watching television, are often done by
groups of people, such as families or friends.
What would it be like
to do collaborative Web browsing?

I feel that this question is the beginning of a new trend.

I imagine pupils in New York browsing about Global Warming then saving and tagging their findings under "Global- Warming- New-York", on Furl, for example

Each pupil can use a whole library of web pages instead of the several that he might have gathered for himself. I think that this kind of Group Web Browsing is fun; it makes you feel that you are a part of a community and that you are not alone in your browsing.

Unfortunately a group can not view QTSaver results on Furl since Furl retrieves the web page only for the subscriber and the public can view the link to the original page which means making the search again. Furl is restricted by copyright regulations but I think that if there would be a place to upload pages to - and get a URI - then furling them would be possible.

I told all this to Furl in my feedback and asked whether they know about such a place/tool on the Web?
Otherwise I'll have to make it all by myself.

Friday, September 09, 2005

Orion

I just read the following article about a new search engine, orion, developed by Ori Alon, which is similar to QTSaver.

Alon said Orion will complement existing search engines like Yahoo, MSN or
Google. This engine will help weed out pages that are less important to searches
and will help search engines improve relevancy, which is always needing
refinement anyway.

Just a week ago I found out about TheConcept and wrote:

Developing a new research tool like QTSaver is a gamble.
– What if you find
out eventually that someone preceded you?

It seems that the market gets crowded.
Let's hope there's a place for us all…

Great Supporter

Allen Searls, VP of the Wondir answering engine, wrote about QTSaver on his Blog:


QTSaver: Microcontent Engine
Zeev on his
new Microcontent Engine
. I got to try it out the other day and found it very
different and very cool. Hopefully he'll have some of the real-time engine APIs
as options available soon as well. I had no idea what QT Saver was until Zeev
let me take it for a spin. It's really a search engine that delivers large
snippets of microcontent and displays them as results, rather than links.
Reminiscent of Answerbus and a few of the Blog engines,
but he's got a new slant. Worth watching how this develops.

I call this kind of support great because it taught me new things about my product.
Regular support is to say: "Great job! Well done! I Love it! I Like it! Etc. It makes you feel good but it doesn't change you.

From your post, Allen, I learned the concept of Microcontent Engine, which led me to a fruitful research about it.
I learned what products are similar to QTSaver and checked them out in order to learn in what way is QTSaver different from them.

Allen, you are a great supporter. Hope QTSaver will keep on surprising you…

Thursday, September 08, 2005

Datablogging

For the last few years I have this vision of using fields in order to create more intelligent options for the Web surfers.

I used to process feature film scripts with Microsoft Access. For example I used to query the headings (INTERIOR-PLACE-TIME) in order to make a list of locations and times.

That's why I love what Joe Reger is doing with his datablogging.

DataBlogging is the notion that traditional Blog entries have extended data
fields appended to them to track various things.

His Demo inspires me to make QTSaver even more retrievable.
Today users can tag microcontents in order to sort them and make an essay. After the sorting the tags disappear. In the future the same tags will be stored and serve for tag-searching.

Wednesday, September 07, 2005

Microcontent Engine







I read on "Minding the Planet" That



Microcontent is "small content." That is, small, granular pieces of content,
each with an unique identity and URI, that may be published, subscribed to, and
linked across the network.

Long ago, while I was learning folk tales at the University, I came across the
Aarne-Thompson Index of "Motifs".



A motif may be an action, an item, a character, or even a direct quote from the
book. However, whatever that motif is, Aarne and Thompson have identified it as
an improtant characteristic of at least one folk tale. Their method involves
comparing the motifs present in the stories. Stories that have many of the same
motifs are then classified as related and given a number.

This idea of taking the smallest unit of an idea fascinated me ever since and the result is QTSaver, which arranges the same web motifs according to different needs.

Tuesday, September 06, 2005

Qtsaver alert

I like the free Google Alert service.
It surprises me long after I forgot that I was interested in whatever made me make the alert.

I happen to know Gideon Greenspan. He founded Google Alert in 2003. He is a Technion Ph.D. student in Haifa Israel.

I told him that I admire him for this bright idea. He checked in his database but didn't find my name on it.

It seems that you subscribed to the "Google alert" alert and
not to mine, but thanks for the compliment anyway.

it might be exciting to see if somebody pays any attention to QTSaver.

The news will arrive at my desktop long after I'll forget that I asked for them…

Monday, September 05, 2005

The Future of the Search Engine

I like reading articles about The Future of the Search Engine.

I just read an interview with Hadley Reynolds from Computerworld. He said on APRIL 15, 2002


When you go the Web and use a search box, you almost always have in
mind receiving some sort of answer, or you wouldn't be there. There's a
disconnect between wanting an answer and getting instead a list of 256,000
documents. It's ergonomically inappropriate. [If we] asked, "What is the
gross national product of the U.S.?" [and] the system came back with an actual
number instead of 256,000 documents, we'd all feel that our Web
investigative life had been revolutionized. And that is where
research is headed.

I admit that I got a list of 9,880,000 documents on Google for "gross national product of the U.S." but the first one was a hit.

It is not exactly what Hadley Reynolds asked for but it is pretty close.

More than 3 years after this interview are we in the future of the Search Engine?

I think that for this kind of questions we certainly are. There are millions of unique terms that will bring you a satisfying answer on the first result. For almost every unique word in any scientific dictionary there is such an answer.

But there are questions that are very difficult to answer. Like "show me articles about senior citizens getting too many results on the web".

Or research questions which only a mountain of results may answer like "global warming policies" For which I got on Google 1,440,000 results. It might take me years to collect the answers. With Qtsaver it might take a shorter period.

Anyhow I think that for this kind of questions...

There is no future to Search Engines!

Sunday, September 04, 2005

Furl it

Yesterday I subscribed to Furl which gives me 5 gigabytes of available storage.

enough to store tens of thousands of web pages.

I tend to agree with Mike Giles, founder of Furl when he says:


There's been so much focus on search on the internet, and very little emphasis
on what you do with that data when you find it.


Qtsaver answers exactly the same question but from another angle:

How are you going to re-use what you've saved; for example, if you want to write an essay based on your saved files?

But most of all I'm interested in Furl because I can store there multiple Qtsaver results pages. It enables each researcher to concentrate all his research in one place.

Next stage will be QTSaving this collection, retrieving all the excerpts that belong to a new subject which is hiding in the collection. For example if I research Global Warming, save on Furl 1000 result pages, and suddenly need to retrieve all excerpts about Ozone Layer –Furl will give me the whole document with the words "Ozone Layer". Qtsaver will organize all the excerpts that fit the Query into a complete essay.

Saturday, September 03, 2005

TheConcept

Developing a new research tool like QTSaver is a gamble.
– What if you find out eventually that someone preceded you?

It is very naïve to put your head in the sand and say whatever will be will be.

Before we embarked on this adventure we looked for similar products; we checked them out and started only after we were convinced that QTSaver is unique. But I never leave my post– I assume that the world is so huge and so full with bright ideas that there will always pop up something new.

Yesterday I found theConcept by Mesa Dynamics.

TheConcept resolves... search engine results from Google (and other search engines)
... and generate reports of citations from the source text in real time.

Danny Espinoza, president of Mesa Dynamics says: We're advancing
our goal of bringing personal data mining to the desktop.


At first sight it looked pretty close to what QTSaver does but taking a closer look I found out that

  • QTSaver is not for Mac only
  • TheConcept doesn't bring all the citations that answer the user's question.

    Now I'm convinced -once again- that QTSaver is unique.
    We can go on with its development.

Friday, September 02, 2005

Looking for Definitions

In QTSaver I get one searchable results page with info from several sites.
It is a very convenient to use this for sophisticated searches within the page.
For example - to look for definitions.

Definitions tend to include in them the words: "is a" .

This is what I got after looking for "is a" in the results page of the search-word "apraxia" in QTSaver:

    • Apraxia is a neurological disorder characterized by the inability to perform learned (familiar) movements on command, even though the command is understood and there is a willingness to perform the movement. Both the desire and the capacity to move are present but
      the person simply cannot execute the act.
    • Oculomotor apraxia is a condition in which patients find it
      difficult to move their eyes.
    • Apraxia is a motor disorder in which volitional or voluntary movement is impaired without muscle weakness. The ability to select and sequence movements is impaired.
In usual search engines it is very hard to execute such drills since you have to do it again and again for each link.

I looked In Google for the word "Dysphagia" and found a definition in the snippet without even opening the link
That's wonderful! I said to myself.

But it was only after I read 7 snippets that I stumbled on that definition.

Thursday, September 01, 2005

To Change the World





















The need to prepare a presentation for our investor brings me back to the beginning.

How did this wonderful QTSaver adventure begin?

Well, I met my partner, Oni, 25 years ago in Quest. Quest was a group of people in which each member was convinced that changing the world is less important than changing him.

Back then Oni and I had a few deep talks about human nature and idealism. After a few months our ways separated . We met again a year-ago in the house of another old friend from the days of Quest. I was busy showing everybody my latest thaumatrope invention. A blue triangle was drawn on one side of a small circular disk of paper, and another blue triangle on the other. This was suspended between two pieces of string. I twirled the disk and Oni saw the flag of Israel.

-What other inventions do you have? Oni asked.
-QTSaver, I answered.


The rest is history.

Anyhow my life turned 180 degrees around. Now I understand that QTSaver is maybe going to change the world, but it seems that I will remain an incorrigible idealist.