Over the last few weeks I have been somewhat critical of the way in which search vendors promote their technology. It makes a recent announcement from Nalytics Technology all the more worthy of a blog. If you live in the UK you will appreciate the importance of the Brexit Bill and the UK Building Regulations. To readers elsewhere in the world the Building Regulations need a few words of explanation. A fire in Grenfell Tower, a 24-storey tower block in London on 14 June, resulted in the deaths of 80 people and  many more injured  It seems that a contributory factor was interpretation of the highly complex Building Regulations as far as fireproofing is concerned, though it will take months for the full story to emerge.

The development of what I call Document Analytics applications has been very rapid over the last couple of years, and quite a number of companies offer services that enable users to work through a document for relevant content rather than just providing a link to the document which the user then has to read through to track down this content. It is an approach that is most visible with the indexing of Google Books.Nalytics Technology is a small UK content analytics vendor that has developed some very neat technology that in effect provides keyword (or keywords) in context as the outcome of a search. They have indexed the Brexit Bill and the Building Regulations and offered them as a public service. I won’t go into more detail about the indexing and content context display as it will be obvious from the links.

What is remarkable about the Nalytics Technology initiative is that here is a search vendor putting its technology out into the market in a very visible and generous way. I have seen more elegant user interfaces (I suspect that this is not the commercial version) but I would guess that not only will professional users find a benefit in this service offering but also members of the public who want to know more about the content of the Bill and the Building Regulations. As a proof of concept I’m sure that it will attract people to find out more about the company and its products. The documents used by Nalanda are in the public domain so are available to any one who might want to provide a service. So my question is this. Why have other search vendors not taken this approach as a way of demonstrating the performance and value of their software?

Martin White