Lemur backed by DTI Award to develop £1.5million next generation search engine
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Lemur Consulting, the award-winning search engine company, is part of a consortium that has been awarded a Department of Trade and Industry grant of £815,000 to build a next generation web search engine.
Early web search engines, such as AltaVista, simply presented a list of documents which contained the words given in the query. Second generation engines, for example Google, added other relevance criteria such as page rank when returning a list of web pages.
Now Lemur is helping to develop the third generation of web search engines. These will include deeper criteria for defining the relevance of the results returned. New factors reveal the intention of web page creators and users. For example, is the page designed to review, or sell? Is the person making the query interested in researching, or buying?
With over ten years experience of specialising in all aspects of data management, Lemur's software team is active in the development and support of many of today's leading information retrieval products. This placed the company in a strong position to succeed in the DTI-led Technology Programme competition for a £1.5million web search engine project to be developed over two years.
Welcoming the new partnership, Science and Innovation Minister, Malcolm Wicks said: "The UK has a proud history of innovation in science and technology. We believe that we must work with industry to develop the marketable products and services of tomorrow, so that we can maintain our position as a leading global economy.
"That's why we're supporting this project to develop the next generation of search engines. It provides a great opportunity to harness the UK's world-class expertise and use it to help boost our economy."
Commenting on this latest award, Lemur's Managing Director, Charlie Hull, said "We were delighted to get through the two highly competitive application rounds to be awarded this prestigious grant. These plans for the next generation of web search engine are very exciting and we are looking forward to working with an interesting group of organisations to achieve them."
About Lemur Consulting
Based in Cambridge, UK, Lemur Consulting Ltd is highly active in the information retrieval market with international clients from sectors including academia, public relations, e-commerce, government and private businesses.
Lemur's Flax(TM) project (www.flax.co.uk) delivers a cutting-edge enterprise search solution, using the power of open source software to drive down costs and provide world beating search performance with no software licence fees. Lemur is also the developer of Bamboo(TM), a collaborative, web-enabled, multimedia database system used by academics and researchers.
This latest DTI award to Lemur follows an award from the British Computing Society in 2005 for an innovative search tool.
About the Technology Programme
The Technology Programme provides funding using two of the DTI's business support products: Collaborative Research & Development and Knowledge Transfer Networks. Over the period 2005-2008, £320 million in funding is being made available from DTI to businesses to support research and development in technology areas identified by the Government's Technology Strategy Board. This funding is increased by contributions from other Government Departments such as Defra (£30m), Regional Development Agencies and Devolved Administrations (£30m) and Research Councils (£26m).
The Programme is investing directly in new and emerging technologies and has been designed to help businesses work collaboratively with each other or with academic partners to develop technologies that will underpin products and services of the future.
In November 2006, DTI announced that, building on its success to date, the Technology Strategy Board would in 2007 become an Executive Non Departmental Public Body taking over responsibility for the delivery of the Technology Programme.
Since 2004, the Technology Programme has supported over 600 projects across 40 technology areas with a combined business and Government investment worth over £900m. 22 Knowledge Transfer Networks (KTNs) have also been established with funding of around £40m over 3 years. For further information: http://www.dti.gov.uk/innovation/technologystrategy
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Lemur Consulting's Bamboo at heart of £423k Rhodesia Project
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The University of the West of England (UWE) in collaboration with Bristol's British Empire and Commonwealth Museum has chosen the Bamboo software suite for a major digitisation project on the archives of the Rhodesian army. A £423,000 grant has been awarded for this work by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the project is expected to run over the next three years. The results will be presented at a public conference, and provide the basis for output such as papers, books and theses.
At present the archive is sitting in hundreds of uncatalogued boxes at the Empire Museum. Researchers who have investigated the boxes have found gems such as poignant photographs of soldiers on both sides of the war for independence; intelligence reports; operational instructions, and policy debates exposing the strengths and weaknesses of a doomed but desperate government. However there is no way of locating specific documents and no organising principle behind the collection, which was saved from destruction after independence in 1980 and smuggled into South Africa.
The Bamboo software, developed by the Cambridge firm Lemur Consulting, is designed specifically for these types of large databases on PCs or the web. It handles multimedia data including text, images, audio and video and uses combination of relational (Boolean) retrieval with the powerful system of probabilistic (Bayesian) retrieval. Searching is very fast and intuitive and Bamboo can run on a server, allowing many users to access the data at once using standard web browsers. Commenting on their choice of software, Project leader Dr Diana Jeater, Principal Lecturer in African History in UWE's Faculty of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences, and also Chair of the Britain Zimbabwe Society said:
"We needed a package which could handle and search across mixed media and unstructured materials, quickly and accurately, and then present findings clearly. Bamboo is excellent for this, and our data will be held in a highly compressed and efficient form and may be input and output as industry-standard XML. Lemur Consulting developed Bamboo as an efficient and flexible tool for humanities computing, they have a proven track record with sustainable software, their costs are competitive and their provision of support is consonant with an academic project."
Also referring to Bamboo, Research Fellow Tim Lovering, who is a military historian and trained archivist, commented:
"The ability to make unexpected associations and connections in our data will be an immensely valuable tool for users researching the collection. Crucially, Bamboo allows a search query to be any shape or pattern of words. This flexibility, combined with the chances of Bamboo finding a range of records relating to the same theme, will greatly expand the potential for users to make new discoveries which will enable them to apply the material in innovative ways."
The project will produce a comprehensive searchable catalogue of this unique collection, with user-friendly web-based access, and a guide to the contents. Up to 10,000 pages of material will also be digitised and included in the Aluka Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa collection, which documents the liberation struggles in southern Africa since the end of World War II. Aluka is a separate project supported in part by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
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Innovative search tool wins medal in the British Computing Society Technology Awards 2005
4th August 2005 - ProfileSkim, a new software tool developed by information retrieval specialists Lemur Consulting in conjunction with the Smart Web Technologies Centre at The Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, has won a medal in the British Computing Society Technology Awards 2005.
ProfileSkim is a plug in for the popular Adobe Acrobat program and allows users to skim large documents such as electronic reports, books and theses, and see at a glance the sections of the document that are of relevance to them. The user enters a query and ProfileSkim produces a bar graph which indicates the relevance of each page in the document. By clicking on the relevance bar, the user can jump straight to the relevant page of the document.
The tool is inexpensive, having been designed for personal use as well as for organisations that need to search large electronic documents to pin-point specific information such as government agencies, companies, libraries and educational establishments.
Professor David Harper of RGU's School of Computing said, "We've undertaken trials of ProfileSkim with local Councils and the feedback has been very positive with users describing the software as intuitive, quick and easy to use. Winning this medal is recognition of the hard work that Lemur Consulting and the Smart Web technologies team at RGU have put in to the development of Profileskim."
The product was developed from an initial prototype by Lemur Consulting. Charlie Hull, Managing Director of Lemur said, "There are plenty of software tools designed for finding relevant documents; search engines such as Google being one example. ProfileSkim does something new - it makes it much easier to find relevant information within a long document."
ProfileSkim will be marketed through RGU's Commercialisation, Research and European Development Office. Details of the product can be found at www.smartweb-products.co.uk
The British Computer Society IT Professional Awards, in association with Computer Weekly, are the most important event in the IT calendar. They mark the key contribution made by the IT profession to economic prosperity, to business efficiency and to our public services.
Launched in their current form in 2003 these Awards have very quickly established themselves as the leading hallmark of success amongst practitioners in the IT industry today.
As standards of sophistication, business acumen and skill in the IT world are continually developing, the role of IT and its effective management is critical across the whole spectrum of business. This cross-industry event recognises, promotes and acclaims excellence, professionalism, innovation and the outstanding achievements to which individuals and groups contribute.
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Free search engine software gains popularity
The free search engine Xapian is gaining popularity as a highly scalable, fast and accurate search engine for websites and intranets. Although free search engine software has existed for many years, few packages offer the combination of speed, scalability and accuracy offered by Xapian, based on the pioneering work of Dr. Martin Porter.
Xapian, licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), is free software originally developed at Brightstation PLC as a replacement for Muscat, the first commercial probabilistic search engine. When Brightstation ceased trading in 2001 some of the team that created Xapian decided to continue developing the software and it is available for free download at www.xapian.org. After three years of subsequent development Xapian is now available for Solaris, Unix, Linux and Windows platforms and is mature and stable with a highly active developer community.
Many organisations across the world are now using Xapian including news providers such as Ananova and Die Zeit, community sites such as Tweakers.net and local government organisations such as the City of Amsterdam. The larger of these sites are indexing many millions of documents. Xapian was also the basis for the Webtop global search engine that indexed over half a billion webpages on modest hardware.
Charlie Hull of Lemur Consulting Ltd who provide support and customisation for Xapian said: "Commercial search engines often cost tens of thousands of pounds in annual license fees for searching even a modest number of documents. The other clear advantage of Xapian is that if a bug is discovered or extra features required, the source code is available so changes can be made quickly and easily. This contrasts with the 'black box' approach of commercial search engine software."
Olly Betts, one of the original Xapian team and founder of Oligarchy Ltd., said: "Xapian is designed to be a highly adaptable toolkit to allow developers to easily add advanced indexing and search facilities to their own applications. Xapian is a modern class library, but has evolved out of over 20 years of commercial and academic experience. Also available is Omega, a packaged search engine for websites built upon the Xapian library."
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Cambridge companies failing to exploit internet search technology - warns Lemur Consulting
2nd March 2004 - Cambridge-based search specialist, Lemur Consulting, today reveals that the vast majority of Cambridgeshire organisations are failing to make good use of internet search technologies on their corporate websites. As a consequence, many will be missing out on business opportunities as prospective customers fail to find the information they require due to absent or inaccurate search facilities, or difficulties experienced when navigating through increasingly complex websites.
Lemur undertook in-depth analysis of over 100 corporate websites from companies active in the local business community. These were of varying size and included start-ups and multinationals. A staggering 57% of websites consisting of over 50 pages, including some representing well-known companies, failed to provide any sort of search facility. As a result, only the most determined visitors would be likely to be able to navigate their way to the information they required. Many of those websites that did have a search facility were shown to deliver inaccurate results.
As more money is spent on an organisation's web presence, more thought should be given to how visitors actually find the information. With internet-related spending by British adults now running at over £2 billion per month (Royal Bank of Scotland) and 5,000 new users joining the net every day (Digital Bulletin) it is vital that companies help potential customers to navigate their website.
"Most companies are aware that potential customers increasingly undertake their fact-finding online and have responded by adding more information to their websites," commented Charlie Hull, director at Lemur Consulting. "However, people now expect information at their fingertips immediately. If they can't find what they are looking for straight away they won't search for long - they will simply go elsewhere - probably to a competitor. "
The site analysis included simple searches - Lemur entered phrases such as "head office" and "managing director" to assess how easily the information could be obtained and whether related results such as "headquarters" and "chief executive" were shown. "Even something as small as a visitor failing to find your address will affect their perception of your company, so it is vital that this information can be found easily" said Mr. Hull.
Those companies with search facilities cannot afford to be complacent - websites with search engines were tested for accuracy by entering searches for information known to be present somewhere on the site, such as product codes. A quarter of these failed to present the information, many presented it only on the second or third page of results and some did not work at all due to software failures.
Mr Hull continues "Now everyone is using search engines such as Google for finding everything from holidays to recipes, it's even more essential that a search engine on a corporate website works - it's the metaphor people are used to. Modern search engines can also provide facilities that vastly enhance how visitors experience your site - functionality such as spelling correction, thesaurus or automatic suggestion of similar documents are becoming commonplace. "
Lemur Consulting Ltd develops cutting-edge information retrieval and search engine software for a variety of markets and provides consultancy services to clients in the new media, e-commerce, academic and other sectors. Lemur's experienced consultants have been designing and applying search technology for over ten years.
Lemur Consulting can provide your website or intranet with a search engine, fine tune your existing search technology and produce information retrieval software for the specific needs of you and your customers. We promise to explain ourselves in a clear and jargon free manner, giving you accurate and honest advice.
For more details please contact Charlie Hull, Managing Director, on (08700) 118334 or via www.lemurconsulting.com .
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21.11.2003 - Lemur Consulting deliver Muscat replacement to the University of Cambridge
Lemur Consulting Ltd, the Cambridge-based Information Retrieval company, announced today that it has delivered an initial version of its next-generation database system to the Rivers Video Project in the Department of Social Anthropology of the University of Cambridge.
"Bamboo", based on Lemur's new information retrieval system, LemIR, replaces the Department's legacy MUSCAT software. Bamboo allows members of the Department to store gigabytes of complex research data including pictures and video and provides highly accurate search facilities. Data from the original MUSCAT system may easily be imported via an XML filter. A customisable web-based front end allows the system to be accessed from a variety of computing platforms.
Professor Macfarlane of the Department said: "Vintage MUSCAT (the Museum Cataloguing System) was in the 1990's the most sophisticated information retrieval system that I could discover anywhere in the world. The combination of structured (boolean) and free text searching, with superb stripping algorithms, combined with its speed made it immensely useful for my research in history and anthropology. Unfortunately, however, it only worked in a DOS environment. "
"Bamboo builds on the earlier power, but is being developed for use in an XML and HTML web environment. It should, like MUSCAT, set the standard for information retrieval and I greatly look forward to its final implementation."
Lemur Consulting Ltd, formed in 2001 by ex-Muscat employees, develops cutting-edge information retrieval and search engine software for a variety of markets and provides consultancy services to clients in the new media, e-commerce and academic sectors. For more details please contact Charlie Hull, Managing Director, via www.lemurconsulting.com.
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7.5.2002 - Lemur Consulting announce investment from Cambridge University
Lemur Consulting Ltd, the Cambridge-based Information Retrieval company started by ex-Muscat employees, today announced that it will receive funding from the Rivers Video Project in the Department of Social Anthropology of the University of Cambridge to develop a next-generation database system for academic research, Bamboo.
The Rivers Video Project in the Department of Social Anthropology and the University of Cambridge more generally have a long history of involvement with the Information Retrieval world. An original version of Muscat was written for the Sedgwick Museum in the University by Dr. Martin Porter, and a later version was developed from 1986 in collaboration with Professor Alan Macfarlane in the Department of Social Anthropology.
Professor Macfarlane said of this latest collaboration: "I have worked with probabilistic search systems for fifteen years and they have provided superb tools which I have never found replicated elsewhere. I have always been able to retrieve what I am looking for very quickly indeed from complex databases of various kinds. I am naturally delighted to continue the link between the University and those who who have worked in this field."
Bamboo will allow members of the Department to upgrade their legacy Muscat systems to use Lemur 's new information retrieval architecture, LemIR, and to enable access to their data on modern computing platforms. Charlie Hull, Managing Director of Lemur Consulting Ltd added: "We are very pleased to collaborate with Professor Macfarlane and his team in developing the next generation of information retrieval systems."< top
11.4.2002 - Free search tool now available from Lemur Consulting
Lemur Consulting Ltd, the new Information Retrieval company in Cambridge, today released a free search tool for the Internet.
The AyeAye Toolbar allows surfers to find web pages similar to the page they are currently reading using Lemur Consulting's unique new document analysis technology, named 'AyeAye' after a species of lemur. The toolbar plugs into Microsoft Internet Explorer and works with several top search services.
According to Charlie Hull, Managing Director of Lemur Consulting Ltd: "Our AyeAye technology automatically filters out the most important words from the text you supply to it and uses these words to ask an Internet search engine a more specific question. So if you're looking at a web page about a particular news story, you can just click the AyeAye Toolbar and very quickly find more information on the same subject."
The toolbar is free and can be downloaded from: www.lemurconsulting.com/ayeayetoolbar
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4.4.2002 - Dr. Martin Porter joins new Information Retrieval company
Lemur Consulting Ltd, the Cambridge UK based Information Retrieval company started by ex-Muscat employees, today announced that Dr. Martin Porter has joined the company as a Technical Associate.
Dr. Porter, author of the Porter Stemming Algorithm, was one of the founders of Muscat Ltd and has over 20 years experience in the Information Retrieval industry.
Charlie Hull, Managing Director of Lemur Consulting Ltd, said today: "Dr. Martin Porter is a world-renowned theoretician and brings his vast range of experience to our growing company. With his help we hope to develop the next generation of information retrieval solutions."
Lemur Consulting Ltd was founded in 2001 by Charlie Hull, Tom Mortimer and Richard Boulton and is developing innovative new technology for searching text data. More information at www.lemurconsulting.com.