Clueray, Inc. was created to provide people a better way to search. By providing unique ways to focus search, Clueray technology takes search and search-based applications beyond the limitations of keywords – beyond the large collections of mixed-intent, mixed-quality results – to quality results which meet specific information needs.

Search is our window to the digital world. Search connects us to the internet. Search connects advertisers to customers. Search connects the enterprise. And search seeds sophisticated, high-value analyses. Search works great … except when it doesn’t. This, in a nutshell, is the problem with search: one time you get exactly what you want, and the next time you don’t find anything useful. Currently, a user’s only recourse is to hope that the next choice of keywords somehow works better. For the variety of search-based applications (eg. business intelligence, brand monitoring, social media measurement, market influence analytics, sentiment analysis, etc), the challenge is even greater, as their goal is to automate the extraction of meaningful information from these highly variable, unstructured data sets. Clueray’s search technology provides end users and search-based apps the ability to focus in on the information they need – and deliver the results they really want.

Ultimately, with search, success comes down to matching intent: user intent to document intent. Sounds simple, right? Well, it’s not. As a surrogate for intent, keyword-based approaches simply match occurrences of words in a document. This approach makes sense, of course, because, one would expect a page relating to a specific topic to name that topic one or more times. However, keywords alone are, at best, incomplete representations of a user’s intent. As Peter Morville puts it in his book Ambient Findability: “… as long as humans use language to communicate, information retrieval will be a messy, imperfect business.”

Although keyword-based approaches to search generally do a pretty good job of matching a user’s query topic, they often have limited success when it comes to meeting a user’s information need. That's where Clueray comes in.

Clueray’s IntentMatch technology starts with a collection of documents (typically returned by a keyword-based search engine) and returns a subset of those documents, the focused results, which meet a set of specified criteria. In the first phase of our public beta, the user is able to focus the results based on the kind of document they are looking for, something we refer to as the document intent. Future versions will expose additional focus elements which allow the user to more completely express their query intent.

Clueray’s IntentMatch technology takes end users and search-based apps beyond the “here are several results which may or may not work for you, you figure it out from here” paradigm to qualified results which match a specified information need.

In Q1 2008, Clueray launched a public beta of its patent-pending IntentMatch technology. Clueray is currently in active conversations with prospective partners and licensees for its unique search optimization and document analysis technology. If you are interested in learning more about Clueray, please email us.