In October 2005 I reviewed a potentially disruptive
search engine called ePrécis, from Syntactica. Unfortunately it got shut down by
Google (they "nearly put us out of business", said Syntactica President Henry Neils). But
there was some heavy duty linguistic theory behind ePrécis and the good news is
that now Syntactica is back with a new product, which looks equally promising.
iReader is a browser extension (for both IE and Firefox, and on PC or Mac) that lets you preview the content of a link, before you click on it. It's similar to the web previews products we reviewed back in January - Browster, Cooliris, Snap, and Sphere. Our conclusion in that post was that previews are good, if implemented correctly - because previews can save us a lot of time over the long run.
iReader (full name: iReader 2.0 Web Previewer) is probably the most sophisticated previews product we've seen on the market yet, because it doesn't just preview a webpage like Snap, or relevant links like Sphere. iReader actually studies the semantics of the content behind each link, and pops up a preview of that content in the form of a short list. The best way to illustrate this is to show you an example. Here is what happens when I hovered over a link in an earlier R/WW post:
As you can see, the preview is useful because it gives me a bullet point list of (hopefully) the main content in the webpage behind the link. This is called an “intelligent summary” by the company.
However there are some rough edges to the app. Sometimes the preview content doesn't seem relevant, as in this example (also from R/WW):
The link previewed there was about Talkr, yet the pop-up displayed content about AOL (which was a whole other post). Perhaps this was pop-up lag, but I did notice some funny results elsewhere too. Another slight criticism is that the pop-ups tend to drive you crazy after a while. Every time your mouse passes over a link, up comes the preview pop-up. That's distracting when you're browsing the Web. But it is a beta product, so you'd expect some rough edges.
However when it comes down to it, there's something about iReader that is attractive. In the press release which will go out later today, it states that iReader "is based on linguistic technology the company has been developing for several years." And indeed, creating an on-the-fly pop-up summary of the content behind a link - in an easily digestable list - is a clever thing. So give it a bit of time. And for those interested in the technical explanation:
"The technology behind iReader 2.0 is Syntactica Web Services, which can be embedded into a number of computer programs that process English language text – including, for example, those for search output, search indexing, or book indexing.
The iReader 2.0 technology works by quickly digesting archived information of a web page and providing the essential meaning, or sense, of the text on that page. The technology can also be integrated into Internet search engines to produce relevant abstracts of text information in real-time. “In short,” said CEO Neils, “this technology quickly compresses massive amounts of electronic English text into meaningful short abstracts along with a reference index.”
What's more, the iReader 2.0 “macro” is being offered on an Open Source basis for developers.
I think this is promising product, albeit possibly too much of a distraction when browsing. But check it out for yourself and let us know what you think.
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Wouldn't it be cool if you could get a preview of assertions made by the site owner. Wouldn't it be more cool to filter out sites that don't make assertions about something you want in preferences?
For example, these URIs are suitable for children, these are accessible to WCAG double-A, these adhere to a direct marketing code and it has a privacy statement. Content Labels :)
I'll take a look to see if there is synergy. Just like I think there is with OpenID and FOAF.
Posted by: Paul Walsh | February 20, 2007 3:09 AMVery cool product. Can you elaborate a little more on how ePrecis was shutdown by Google? It seemed like a great technology, and I'm just curious as to how a 'do-no-evil' company can almost kill Syntactica.
Posted by: John | February 20, 2007 5:38 AMI didn't actually see anything about open source on their site, just a bit about a not-for-commercial-use XML web service. I tried to find the terms of use for it but that bit of their website doesn't seem to be finished yet.
Posted by: Seth Wagoner | February 20, 2007 6:38 AMThe coscept has always been brilliant...unfortunately I have seen many reviews and the majority if not all think the feature is more of a nusiance.
Posted by: Adrian Keys | February 20, 2007 6:56 AMAny suggestions on making iReader less of an annoyance are welcomed. The next release will have right mouse button click enable/disable. Also suggested, a way to say not to show previews on certain web sites.
Posted by: Charlie | February 20, 2007 7:22 AMI noticed that the pop-ups also work on Sponsor (paid) Listings in Google. That will piss them off since that's how they make 100% of their revenues.
Wouldn't be surprised if one of the big players (Google, MSN, Yahoo) buys them out and starts dropping paid text listings into these abstracts on the fly. They could now conceivably generate revenues from any site on the Internet containing links (including their own competitors' sites) instead of just their own search results pages.
Hmmm.
Posted by: CJ | February 20, 2007 7:33 AMIf you go to tools/iReader in IE, or options/iReader pane in Firefox, there is a control panel. There you can set "sensitivity" in milliseconds. That is the delay time on a mouseover on a link before the iReader data is displayed.
That is the best way to control how soon iReader shows information.
Posted by: Charlie | February 20, 2007 7:35 AMSince this tool understands natural language, it could also be used to combat SPAM by analyzing sentence structure, grammar, etc.
Most tools only look for specific words or phrases vs. the entirety of the email in context. (especially the gobbledy-gook spammers stick at the end of the email to throw off SPAM filters).
Interesting concept when you start applying it into different applications.
Posted by: CJ | February 20, 2007 10:15 AMI haven't installed it yet, but I'd find this incredibly useful for my browser favourites and links.
A short hover over my badly organised favourites folder would show me what the page was that I saved a few months back for a long forgotten reason!
As for the browser plug-in, since they can render whatever they want within the window, I'd suggest they do a similar thing as Snap, but better since they control the browser environment.
I mean put a small icon next to or over the link when you mouse over it, that way if you want a preview you can deliberately hover your mouse on the small icon, rather than the whole link. In many cases the link might be an image or a banner ad stretching across the whole of a page, that would be annoying.
Posted by: Jonathan | February 20, 2007 11:34 AMBit of an update - I ended up turning it off after a short time, as the pop-ups were driving me nuts. I love the concept behind this product, but something needs to be done about how many pop-ups a user sees. Ideally the user should be able to control this in some way. Tough UI issue to solve, but this is the problem with auto previews like Snap and now iReader.
Posted by: Richard MacManus | February 20, 2007 12:39 PMAnother slight criticism is that the pop-ups tend to drive you crazy after a while. - I did think this was the understatement of the day ;-)
I agree, the UI is the issue - great concept (let people see where they might be going before they head off) - that probably works in real life but extremely hard to replicate in a virtual/online world.
Posted by: Mike Riversdale | February 20, 2007 2:01 PMIt's also "non-standard", ie it's just not what links are meant to do (yet?). Subsequently it's forcing the user to think when using your/my/anyone's web site - not good is it Steve Krug?
This inspired me to write a blog post:
"link previews (like snap) are completely backwards"
http://bla.st/site/blog/65/
To summarise: "This functionality should be built into the browser, not individual web pages."
Posted by: Tim | February 20, 2007 5:00 PMTotally agree it should be in the browser - and configurable in terms of summary length etc. maybe also what sites it should be defaulted to "on" for. Also agree it would be good for bookmarks - would also be great for my netvibes.com page and similat - I spend a lot of time going to the preview page when it would be far more efficient to "hover" and get a swift preview. Maybe this is a pointer for netvibes.com as well.
Posted by: Alistair Brown | February 21, 2007 2:57 AMAt least you get the choice whether or not to install it. Snap and to a lesser extent intelletext become so frustrating and I am sure drive away visitors.
Posted by: Allan | February 21, 2007 3:27 AMAfter reading your post, I was excited to try out iRead but came away disappointed. It was obstrusive and the information featured was often incomplete or not relevant.
Posted by: Mark Evans | February 21, 2007 8:34 AM