It’s been a while since our last update, indicating a transition for the Helioid team, and we thought it was time for an update on what we’ve been up to. As we’ve noted in many past posts, our dedication to Helioid came from our own frustration in exploring new topics of interest and a desire to provide a tool that helped filter out the proverbial needles from the proverbial haystacks by categorizing search results. We remain committed to helping that long tail of exploratory searchers and to working with and supporting the community of innovators in the search space.

So, we’re pleased to announce the release of a categorization library, installable as a Ruby gem, which developers can use to categorize search results, or any other document collections they’d like to add a layer of structure to, in order to support more intuitive navigation. For example, the cluster model categorizes the first five summaries for a “helioid” search as:

“search refinement”
“floor silicon”
“word difficult”

A few nights ago, after finally getting around to watching as much of Mitt Romney’s RNC speech as I could bear, I had a curious dream. In this dream, I came upon a lake covered in a haze, in the dim light of the wee hours. And beside this lake, I found a picnic table. And at that picnic table, sat Mitt Romney. I sat down, we began to chat, and I was pleased to find he was much more personable than I would have guessed. After a while, he opened up and confided that he was coming to terms with the fact that he probably wasn’t going to be President. I agreed that the odds were against him, and admitted that I myself was coming to terms with an impending transition.

We’ve been working for some time to establish Helioid as a self sufficient search company, aiming to succeed where many startups in this space have failed, by serving the long tail of exploratory searchers and offering advanced research tools to heavy users. We’ve had considerable success: we’ve provided a novel tool serving thousands of unique users a day, and from conversations we’ve had with the people who’ve tried us out, it’s clear we’ve hit upon a pain point that has gone under-addressed in search.

But for a variety of reasons, the Helioid team has decided to refocus our efforts toward other interests of ours outside of search, and hold off on further major development of Helioid Search. The good news, however, is that we will maintain our present search services, and of course we will keep you all up to date on our ongoing projects. Thank you to all of our dedicated users, and we hope you keep using Helioid to suss out the needles from those haystacks. And thanks to Dream Mitt Romney, for listening.

Helioid is committed to testing and proving our approaches to search against information retrieval problems affecting a wide range of research-oriented fields. As such, Helioid was a participant in the TREC 2011 Legal Track challenge, all submissions and results of which are now public. The TREC 2011 Legal Track challenged participants to rank and score [...]

Helioid presenting at the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) conference 2012.

Kenneth Hamilton and Peter Lubell-Doughtie of Helioid presenting at the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) conference 2012. Using Helioid’s search refinement tools you can find and explore what you are looking for by interactively narrowing your search results. Helioid is a visual search and aggregation tool that enables the exploration of information. See all the videos.

Here are all the lovely slides from our presentation at this year’s Society of Scholarly Publishing conference. Take a look!

Helioid’s Founders just presented on the Startup Panel at this year’s Society of Scholarly Publishing conference!

Helioid’s lookin’ pretty sweet after a brand new re-design. The new Home page sports our awesome new logo and a sampling of the queries other people are Following:

Or: How to Hit Bee Hives With Pine Cones.

A few weeks ago, we wrote an article reacting to Paul Graham’s essay on what he sees as the seven areas in which some highly ambitious startups would have the opportunity to get down to some serious earth-shaking disruption. We noted, however, that Graham’s venture fund, Y Combinator, “mostly gravitates toward startups making relatively small, iterative progress on existing idea spaces,” rather than engaging in the kind of dramatic experimentation that a fund like YC, which dispenses small amounts of cash over large numbers of start-ups, would be perfectly suited to engage in. And here’s where we got into a bit of trouble.