NetBase – the company behind the Insight Discovery next-generation semantic search technology – is looking forward to an interesting spring. The company is working with one of the largest publishers of medical information, and by April about 60 percent of nurses around the world will be looking up information in its resources with the help of NetBase’s HealthBase Insight Discovery tool and lenses.

But also in the April timeframe, the next sibling in the NetBase toolbelt, ConsumerBase, will become generally available. It rounds out a line that so far also features ScienceBase; that product's APIs are used in NetBase partner’s Reed Elsevier’s Illuminat8 web-based research tool for the scientific and R&D knowledge worker communities, to help them find and make connections among data to accelerate discoveries and fast-forward commercial opportunities.

CEO and co-founder Jonathan Spier says he’s “super-excited about” the latest addition. Why? Five of the top ten CPG companies in the world are working with NetBase to adapt the vendor’s text analytics, natural-language processing and search and semantic indexing technologies to their own ends. To wit, that is gaining consumer insight both through their internal data as well as through other sources including, as one priority, social media.

The NetBase technology crawls over 9 billion pages, refreshed monthly (because its solutions are oriented at serving specific markets, Spier says it doesn’t have to do Google-scale crawling). It also provides comprehensive social media feeds to the tune of indexing content for 400,000 posts an hour through the system. It has over 30,000 terms so far in its lexicon to account for alternative spellings, urban words, common misspellings and other Web 3.0 language phenomena into the mix.

Spier won’t publicly name who the five consumer companies are yet, but says that “for five of the top ten CPG companies to come to us and ask for this – that says something....Companies have so much information, their own internal databases of content, call center transcripts, survey research they’ve done for years and years,” he says – plus publishers’ premium content and information out on the web, where consumers are talking about their needs and interests across social networks.

“Someone once said to us that If you think it’s difficult to go to the public web and run a search on hair, try it inside our company where Hair is the name of a division,” Spier says. “Fundamentally, we’re seeing a hunger in the world to understand content better, make search better with technologies that can take a lens view and focus on what the content really means to deliver better answers back to users,” Spier says. Lenses are a patent-pending technology that the vendor describes as focusing searches by organizing the patterns detected by its semantic technology in the context of a specific set of questions relevant to a specific discipline or audience of researchers.

How the NetBase technology that ConsumerBase builds on does that is through full deep sentence parsing and focusing on the connective tissue in sentences between concepts, words and ideas. “We are literally parsing and understanding the entire sentence, keeping the entire sentence structure, and when you can do that you can do powerful things,” Spier says. “We package that into the lenses to answer questions directly for end users. Because of how we have organized the lenses we have more pound for pound depth that we can get out of content.”

Its non hard-wired approach bests keyword search and sentiment filtering, he says, because it understands the importance of those connection words. Imagine, as an example, a social network posting that reads, “I know Product X kills germs because it hurts.” Says Spier, “the most relevant word in that sentence is ‘because.’” Yet search ignores that and sentiment analysis gets it wrong, because it associates hurt with something bad, whereas in this context hurt equates to a good thing. It expresses the notion that the consumer feels the product is getting the job done. CPG companies and their marketing departments want to be able to get that kind of insight, and they want it fast. They want to know as soon as possible that the ‘no pain, no gain’ message potentially could resonate with buyers, and perhaps use that information to explore whether, for example, there is also an opportunity to create a pain-free version of the product that it can tout as working equally well.

CPG Game-Changer?
Knowing what consumers are thinking and talking about – without having to rely solely on expensive and time-intensive projects such as focus groups and in-store observations — can be a game-changing opportunity, to derive not only new market strategies but rapid innovation in everything from packaging to product line expansions. According to NetBase, some customers of Illumin8 have been able to cut development cycles down by six months because they find what they need to know in the first day of using the product. The message for ConsumerBase: Faster time to innovation, lower marketing costs and validated market decisions.

Dashboards with interactive widgits provide a variety of different views into the data and ways of interpreting it. The focus for ConsumerBase is on ease of use for the marketing community, says Lisa Joy Rosner, chief marketing officer at NetBase. Marketers “have to be able to walk up, grok it and get what they want or they give up quicky,” she says, “and I know as someone who fits the description.”

ConsumerBase in action.