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'Search Giants Don't Wade...'
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Mark Hall
April 23, 2007
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... into the pool of online databases. “Databases are places where
[online search engines] don’t look,” observes John Grace,
CEO of Enth Inc. in Westmont, Ill. Pity, too. As Grace points out,
databases have answers to questions, whereas search engines can only give you
links to places that may or may not have what you’re looking for.
The problem with getting answers from online databases is that users need to
create meaningful queries.
But visitors to www.enth.com can use simple
English-language questions (“Who hit the most home runs in 1963?”), and
Enth’s Dynamic SQL Generation feature automatically transforms them into
SQL requests that databases understand. Today, the databases that Enth
supports mostly revolve around sports — trivia buffs may get sore fingers
from typing questions into Enth — but databases on demographics are also
available. Grace says companies can use Enth to make their internal databases
more accessible to workers who are unfamiliar with SQL query practices.
But what he thinks might be more interesting is tying your internal databases
with Enth’s online ones for more complex searches. For example, he says,
you could link your historical regional sales data with area population
shifts to glean relationships.
Grace doesn’t see Enth as competition to
Google Inc. or other search giants. For one thing, he acknowledges,
“we can’t answer most questions.” For another, it takes time to prep the
Dynamic SQL Generation tool for each online database. That said, the
potential of using common text-string searches to query structured data
is exciting. And worth watching.
Copyright © 2007, ComputerWorld, Inc.
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