ePrecis an impressive search tool

There’s a pretty innovative search tool that I mentioned on the online marketing links blog earlier this week called ePr?ï¿½cis. Ward Johnson of ePr?ï¿½cis who has been working with the development of the tool the past few years with a group of linguists at the University of Minnesota called me last week to talk about it. ePr?ï¿½cis is not a search engine that crawls the web collecting it’s own data per se, rather it is an application that overlays existing search results data and creates abstracts. Johnson mentioned it works best with more technical queries such as medical, scientific, legal, etc, but compares very much to Google results on just about any search.

Here’s a more specific explanation of ePrecis from the white paper:

“ePr?ï¿½cis is not a program per se, but a C++ language application programmer interface (API) that can be embedded in any number of applications to return relevant outputs given a wide variety of natural language inputs. In addition to plugging into Web browsers or search engines, it could plug into word processing programs to automatically provide abstracts, executive summaries, back-of-the book indexes, and writing or translation support.”

Richard MacManus of ZDNet has a great post on ePrecis also. Try it out here.