October 15, 2003

Organisations have gained considerable business value from consolidating their structured data into data warehouses and extracting new insights from this data with advanced data analysis tools.

The next stage in the quest for information is to extract meaning from the vast amount of information available on Web using Web analytics. In simple terms, Web analytics tools teach computers to read for comprehension and to recognise patterns of meaning in the text of documents. These new tools make the Web a valuable new source for business decisions.

IBM is realising the fruits of its three-year research project to create such a text analytics system. WebFountain runs on an IBM supercomputer and monitors everything on the World Wide Web. WebFountain contains over a petabyte of storage with over 3 billion pages indexed, 2 billion pages stored and the ability to mine 20 million pages a day.

Web Fountain is not about building a better search engine; it is about identifying patterns, trends and relationships that can be used by businesses to transform the way they work.

WebFountain can spot trends in public opinion and popular culture as they emerge and watch them catch hold around the world. WebFountain can be used as a surrogate for public opinion, providing instant, comprehensive virtual market research in the place of newspapers, Web page research or a professional report. WebFountain lets managers keep track of their business environment and quickly understand the marketplace response to their marketing activities. In other words, to answer the John Wanamaker complaint, 'I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but I can never find out which half.'

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