Twing.com was a search engine before the end of 2008 specializing in

internet forum An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporar ...

content, located in Jersey City, New Jersey, with data centers around the world. Twing.com used

vertical search A vertical search engine is distinct from a general web search engine, in that it focuses on a specific segment of online content. They are also called specialty or topical search engines. The vertical content area may be based on topicality, media ...

ing as a forum search service that seeks out communities based on common forum formats. The product disappeared from the Web in late November, 2008, when the product division's parent company

Accoona Accoona was an Dot-com company, internet company with offices in Jersey City, New Jersey, and Shanghai, China. Their main product was a search engine that claimed to use artificial intelligence to better understand searches. On June 23, 2005, in ...

ceased business operations. Twing.com did not use the typical

web crawler A Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing (''web spid ...

method but recognizes the footprint and structure of forum content and indexes such content according to its context, and then allows for

word sense disambiguation Word-sense disambiguation (WSD) is the process of identifying which sense of a word is meant in a sentence or other segment of context. In human language processing and cognition, it is usually subconscious/automatic but can often come to consc ...

of concepts through use of topical category and other filters. Additionally, prior to ceasing operations, Twing.com began collecting and indexing content from Twitter and other real-time

user generated content User-generated content (UGC), alternatively known as user-created content (UCC), is any form of content, such as images, videos, text, testimonials, and audio, that has been posted by users on online platforms such as social media, discussion f ...

sources.

Content disambiguation

To allow for disambiguation, Twing.com is utilizing interface concepts such as Faceted Search and Filtering in the Search Engine Result Pages, (SERPs). These are advanced search methods that attempt to assist users with their

information foraging Information foraging is a theory that applies the ideas from optimal foraging theory to understand how human users search for information. The theory is based on the assumption that, when searching for information, humans use "built-in" foraging me ...

efforts by keeping them on an information scent trail. Category filters, based on the directory taxonomy, are one of the filtering methods available. This is an attempt to solve the generalized search problem of ambiguity that often occurs in search results as well as forum search results. A good example might be the word "bass." If you do a search for bass on Wikipedia, you get a disambiguation page to determine if the phrase in this case means a musical instrument, a company name, part of a place name, a beverage, and other options. While adding key terms to a search may sometimes collapse ambiguities, doing so can also exclude things of value. So category filters can help solve the problem of ambiguity in search engine results, whether such search engines are forum search specific or not. Additional filters are available based on language entity extraction from content and proprietary algorithms and dictionaries. Twing.com's use of such technology is discernible from seeing the filters available within the search results pages.

Forum content collection

The Twing.com robot, (called Twingbot), was designed to understand the formats of Internet Forums, (a.k.a. Bulletin Boards or Discussion Groups.) While the Twing.com product was open to the world in January, 2008, the Twingbot robot had been observed 'in the wild' at least several months earlier. (The Twingbot robot had identified itself as User-Agent: Twingbot/1.0 and formerly had its own descriptive web page at www.twingbot.com/)

References

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External links

Some Historical Screen Shots of Twing Community Search Product from November, 2008 prior to closing of parent company Accoona
* PC Magazine Search Without Googl
Part II Page 1
an
Part II Page 2

Affiliate Marketing Forum

ABC News: Ahead of the Curve

AppScout: Twing - Search Forums and Discover Communities

Mashable: Twing Buzz Graphs

Red Ferret Journal March 11, 2008 Article

Tech2All: Twing - The Forum Search Engine

Twing: Searching the Deep Web

SEO Speaker and Internet Marketer
Internet search engines Companies based in Jersey City, New Jersey

Content disambiguation

Forum content collection

See also

References

External links