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RSS feedsBritish search technology company Autonomy is to launch new tools, which it says will mimic the behaviour of ants, to improve the discovery of fresh information.
Traditionally, search engines have used ‘spiders’ to sort content, which are limited to static information. Autonomy’s updated Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) will deliver an alert when an information source changes, allowing it to access the data that is most up to date.
The Cambridge-based firm dubbed the new search method Intelligent Ant Technology after an analyst warned that the need to capture information from frequently updated sources such as company databases required systems to “look beyond the spider”.
Nicole Egen, chief marketing officer at Autonomy, said its new IDOL software mimics the behaviour of ants by leaving behind a trail allowing future searches to know the best paths to take towards fresh, relevant results.
“The spider technology has been out for probably the last decade,” she said. “It went out and searched against stored indexes of information. What it doesn’t do is find and bring back new information. We hope that our combination of spider and ant technology will bring together the efficiency of spiders with the ant’s capacity to bring back fresh data.”
Egen said the ants would be able to discover data in internal documents, such as business intelligence and knowledge management systems and the intranet, as well as regularly updated external news sites.
In a presentation in October in which he coined the idea of ants colonising the internet, Whit Andrews, vice president of research at Gartner, warned that new approaches were needed to discover, distil and deliver information. “Nowadays, workers performing electronic searches want access to more of the data available to their companies – and better technologies for delivering it,” he said.
