DowQuest Brings Parallel Processing To Retrieval

A topic search through 185 publications in a fraction of a second? That's the claim of DowQuest, the utility available since June 15 to subscribers of Dow Jones News/Retrieval, the business information service of Dow Jones & Co.

The new service combines the speed of a massively parallel supercomputer with sophisticated relevance feedback search techniques to deliver a response to English language requests in approximately 74 milliseconds.

DowQuest users must pay a surcharge of $2.00 a minute from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. and $1.00 a minute otherwise. The service complements existing historical search options, Text and Text Menu. Text supports keyword searches using Boolean logic, while the user-friendly Text Menu offers menu-driven searching through the publication database.

From six to 12 months of back issues of all publications are stored in the News/Retrieval database. DowQuest is the only News/Retrieval search facility that uses parallel processing and relevance feedback methods.

The supercomputer, which employs 32,000 processors, is called the Connection Machine and is manufactured by Thinking Machines Corp. Each search request is broadcast to this bank of processors, which collectively can turn the job around in lightning speed. Another Connection Machine, which doubles as a development environment, stands by as a hot back-up.

To begin a search, the subscriber enters an English language command, like "high-performing stocks in the medical industry affected by state insurance legislation". In less than a second the search result appears in the form of a list of headlines of related stories ranked in order of relevance.

Using relevance feedback methods, the user can then initiate a second search using the most appropriate article(s) found on the resulting list. DowQuest then seeks all articles containing words that most frequently match those found in the topic article.