Venture Capitalist Bill Burnham posts the most thoughtful analysis of what Vast means to the evolving Internet marketplace I've read so far.
Bill notes:
Vast is a multi-category vertical search engine with its first three categories being automobiles, jobs, and personals. Vast is similar in some respects to other category specific vertical search players, such as Simplyhired and Trulia, however, as its name clearly suggests, it has more expansive ambitions. What makes Vast particularly noteworthy is that one of the key ingredients in its secret sauce is a very advanced entity extraction engine. Entity extraction is the process of “mining’ unstructured data for key attributes (such as model of a car or the salary level of a job) which are then separately indexed. Entity extraction is much more sophisticated than screen scraping because it uses semantic inferences, and not pre-determined static “maps”, to determine what entities are present in a given piece of text.
His analysis about the potential of this technology is worth the read.
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