Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. (NTT)'s research and development (R&D) center has developed a new technology that allows large volumes of data to be used for a search engine, to be collected and categorized much faster than a conventional system, the company said Wednesday.
Building a search engine the conventional way takes two steps. First, information must be collected from the Web. That pooled information is then categorized for the search engine so that Internet users can search for information with a keyword, according to Tomokazu Yamashita, a spokesman at NTT's R&D center.
NTT's new system is able to collect and categorize information at the same time, Yamashita said, although he offered no further details about how this was achieved.
It normally takes between one week to one month for a search engine system to get ready for operation because it must first collect a large volume of information and categorize it, he said. However, using this new technology NTT will be able to update the information on its search engine in about 10 to 15 minutes, he said.
The Tokyo company Wednesday started a two-month trial at the Goo portal site, which provides a search engine and is operated by NTT's group company NTT-X Inc. At first, the trial will be focused on the news category to show off the technology's capabilities.
Users can try to search with the same keyword at the original and the new search engines to see the difference on the Goo site, Yamashita said.
The new search engine should have more up-to-date news available because of its ability to build the information quicker.
NTT plans to expand the number of available categories after the two-month trial and will decide on future marketing strategies for the system at that time, he said.