On the 18th of January 2011, PRESANS introduces X-Search (x-search.presans.com), worldwide expert search engine. (1) X-Search crawls tens of millions of scientific sources (scientific literature, patents, research center websites etc.). (2) X-Search indexes and structure the information into expert profiles. (3) Sending a query from X-Search search bar returns a list of potential most qualified experts.

X-Search mines the web for millions of experts

Millions of experts exist in the world; most of them leave tracks on the web through scientific literature, patents, research center corporate websites, blogs, forums etc. X-Search, PRESANS Expert Search Engine technology allows automatically building network of Expert (expertise mapping).

• The “crawling module” constantly crawls tens of millions of these scientific sources to collect relevant information.
• Collected information is then analyzed (indexed and structured): the engine automatically builds a real-time network of experts. Experts are described by a number of fields including contact details, institution, collaborations, and field of expertise.
• The “visible part” of the search engine is a search bar. A query corresponding to the scientific need is launched through the search bar. The engine returns a list of potential qualified experts. A ranking function ranks most relevant experts first.

Technological innovations

Dr Vassilis Plachouras and his team at PRESANS have made a series of technological innovations to provide the following advantages to X-Search:

• Structuring: the “entity recognition module” recognizes and analyses textual documents referring to potential experts and builds structured expert profiles.
• Intelligent: semantic analysis and supervised machine learning give sense to the query and allow suggestion of relevant experts beyond a simple keyword search.

X-Search is the first free worldwide expert search engine

X-Search is launched by PRESANS on the 18th of January and the best thing is that anybody can ask for a free activation code. Registration to access X-Search Freemium is completely free and will always be! Drop us a line at x-search [at] presans [dot] com if you’d like to join the private beta.