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Best of the Bots An Investor's Secret Weapon By Don Barker
FinanceWise is specifically designed to retrieve, analyze, index, and present only finance-related information from the Internet. Instead of attempting to index millions of irrelevant Web pages, like mainstream search engines, FinanceWise targets only the sites with relevant content to the global financial community. It currently searches a predefined set of premium sites, but in the near future, FinanceWise will crawl the entire Web, looking for financial data wherever it hides. Figure 1 shows the opening page of FinanceWise. In order to get the most out of this search engine you’ll need to take a few moments to complete a relatively hassle-free registration form. Once the registration process is complete, be sure to bookmark your personal page as your entry point into FinanceWise. At present, your personalized page looks pretty much like the start page but it isn’t hard to imagine how this page could become an excellent tool for delivering custom financial news and content based on a user’s preferences. The personal FinanceWise page provides several ways to search for financial information. First, the Smart Search option lets you search based on company, organization type, country, region, or language. Second, the Search by Sector option presents you with a table of financial-oriented categories, as shown in Figure 2. You’ll find a list of related topics beneath each of these top-level categories (sectors), For instance, clicking on the Emerging Markets topic, under the Investments sector, results in approximately 70 resource links, with detailed descriptions. Returning to the personalized page you can use the Search FinanceWise Bookshop to locate financial books based on title, publisher, or subject. The final section of the FinanceWise start page offers you a powerful Key Word Search, along with helpful searching tips, for finding financial data on the Web. For example, you can simply enter a key word, like "IPO" (Initial Public Offering), in the keyword search text box and punch the Search button. (For an extensive glossary of investor-related terms like IPO, see http://www.investorwords.com). Within a few seconds, FinanceWise will display the results of your query, as illustrated in Figure 3. Scrolling down examining the links and descriptions, you can make a selection, like "IPO Central" (http://www.ipocentral.com/). The IPO Central site lets you locate information on specific class of IPOs, like those for computer companies with online technologies, as portrayed in Figure 4. How does FinanceWise work? It uses the latest IBM Intelligent Miner technology (http://www.software.ibm.com/data/iminer/) to identify and extract high-value intelligence from Web documents. Through a process called "knowledge discovery," relevant information is uncovered in the form of associations, patterns, and trends. Intelligent Miner can also detects deviations, groups and classifies information, and develops predictive models. Andreas Prokoph, a senior software engineer at IBM in Germany, was a consultant contributing to the feasibility study and initial design of the FinanceWise site. He said that the FinanceWise uses Spidey, IBM’s Web crawler, to gather information about Web pages for Intelligent Miner to analyze and organize. Intelligent Miner uses traditional statistical analysis, neural methods, and optimization to categorize data, and then stores the document profile and statistical information in a DB 2 database while the document content is stored in a fulltext index by NetQuestion. NetQuestion is a full-featured search engine, designed by Andreas for IBM, and provides the means for users to quickly and easily find matches to queries. Andreas stressed that this system is highly scalable, fast, and requires relatively modest hardware support, running on either AIX or Windows NT operating systems. Although chiefly intended for the banking and financial professional, FinanceWise can be a very useful tool for the individual investor. However, as FinanceWise’s "Terms and Conditions" point out, the content at the site (or in this column, for that matter) does not constitute financial advice and no responsibility is accepted for the accuracy or timeliness of the data or any loss that may occur as a result from using the content.
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Next to sex, money is probably the
most popular topic on the Web (okay, games may be a close second). Until recently,
investors looking for hot new stock offerings, economic trends, and other financial news
had to wade through mounts of irrelevant search engine results to glean a few gems. Now, a
new search engine, FinanceWise (
