User:Scottwrites/Twing

Twing is a search engine specializing in Internet Forum content. Vertical search focuses on particular types of content, either by topic area or type of information. In terms of types of information, there are many ways to break down online media types, such as all web pages, blogs, news, images, etc. Twing in particular is a forum search service that seeks out communities based on common forum formats.

Twing's efforts are notable in that their indexing approach to bulleting board / forum content does not use a typical web crawler method as do most search engines. Instead, Twing's collection technology recognizes the footprint and structure of such content and indexes such content according to its context, and then allows for Word sense disambiguation of concepts through use of topical catetory and other filters.

Content Disambiguation
To allow for disambiguation, Twing 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 infomration foraging 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's use of such technology is discernible from seeing the filters available within the search results pages.

Forum Content Collection
The Twing robot, (called Twingbot), is designed to understand the formats of Internet Forums, (a.k.a. Bulletin Boards or Discussion Groups.) While the Twing 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 identifies itself as User-Agent: Twingbot/1.0 (+http://www.twingbot.com/)

Twing: The Company
Twing is located in Jersey City, NJ and operates data centers in multiple locations around the world.