Introducing the Industry Graph - Extending Searching & Discovery Intelligence

Useful context is the latest frontier of Internet information. Google is pioneering the next stage of Internet search with its Knowledge Graph, which aims to understand the searcher’s intent and the contextual meaning of his/her search terms[1].  Facebook has been developing its Social Graph for people to people context by learning the personal relationships of its users[2].  Yahoo has been developing the Interest Graph which builds a context of personal identity that can be used as indicators of such things as what people might want to do or buy, where they might want to go, or who they might want to meet, vote for or follow.[3]

Now the Industry Graph, created by Industry Building Blocks (IBB) and News Patterns, is another source of useful decision making context.  The Industry Graph is being developed to serve competitive strategy and financial decision making.  The Industry Graph first creates useful competitive context around the companies competing in 15,000 granular industries[4].  This high degree of granularity enables useful intra-industry and inter-industry financial and strategy analyses.  The Industry Graph creates a real time situational awareness by prioritizing news that might indicate interesting industry trends or changes within the industry composition and broader inter-industry ecosystem.  This Industry Graph context is the foundation for superior searching, discovery, competitive analysis, situational awareness, market anticipations, financial tracking and investing strategies.

Industry Graph Discovery starts with granular industry definitions.  In the above illustration, industry i2 is the relevant industry from which granular and contextual searching and discovery is required.  Real time news and social media are continuously gathered relative to a specific company (red check marks) and the specific contextual lens of industry 2 with associated competitors, suppliers, buyers, substitutes and new entrants (blue check marks).  Competitive pattern seeking algorithms discover the priority articles and trends that might deserve attention within and between industry forces.

Key Advantages of Industry Graph Search and Discovery

·         Granular Industry Graph context enables superior searching, discovery, competitive analysis and financial tracking.

·         Searcher does not need to define the details of his/her competitive environment: competitors, suppliers, buyers, new entrants and substitute relationships.

·         Search engines and news feed services can enable superior business and financial search results for users without their laborious and tedious effort of refining or maintaining search queries.

·         Discovery enables a real-time process for prioritized situational news and social media awareness.

·         Once personalized discovery is activated, decision makers do not need to dedicate daily effort to searching or scanning for relevant news, trends and social media information, or waiting for others to pass information along.

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[1] Google, Knowledge Graph, http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/search/knowledge.html, October 9, 2013

[2] Wikipedia, Social Graph, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_graph, October, 9, 2013

[3] Wikipedia, Interest Graph, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interest_Graph, October 9, 2013
[4] Similar contextual build-out efforts are also under way for political campaigns.