Prepress
Scripps Networks Chooses Nstein to Power Content Classification
Friday 24. October 2008 - Nstein's TME crucial component of overarching SEO & search initiative at HGTV, Food Network, DIY Network, Fine Living Network & Great American Country (GAC) Web sites
Nstein Technologies Inc. www.nstein.com (TSX-V: EIN), a leader in digital publishing solutions for newspapers, magazines and online content providers, announced that Scripps Networks, parent company of popular lifestyle television and Internet brands, has selected Nstein’s TME (Text Mining Engine) solutions to semantically analyze – and associate – its vast library of lifestyle content.
Scripps Networks, a subsidiary of Scripps Networks Interactive, owns and develops content for five of the world’s most popular home, food and lifestyle cable networks and Internet sites. The Web sites attract an average of more than 18.5 million unique visitors each month and are leaders in their respective categories. The SN Digital team puts user satisfaction front and center in everything it does, and as such knew that the extensive, deep sites needed a search upgrade.
To significantly improve reader satisfaction and retention at its sites, SN Digital created a taxonomy and controlled vocabularies (Thesauri) based on the top terms searched and chose Nstein to incorporate these foundational elements into Nstein’s semantic analysis engine. Nstein’s TME allows a combination of machine learning and business rules to automate much of the tagging with the highest degree of accuracy possible. Editors still have the ability to verify results, but the overall burden of manual tagging is greatly reduced.
“All good search is based on the quality of the tags,” explained Michael Campbell, Program Manager of Search for SN Digital. “Without proper tagging and a broad and deep tagging exercise – it really can’t be an optimal user experience.” Campbell illustrated some of the frustrations readers felt prior to this massive undertaking. “The HGTV Dream Home is exceedingly popular, and is often a search term used by site visitors. But instead of always getting the most recent information and content, they could get something from years prior. Another example relates to our food sites, where terms like ‘dressing’ could relate to salad dressing or stuffing and needs to provide both options. We want a search that gives users what they came to the site to find.”
“We are thrilled to work with a client like Scripps Networks that really understands the importance of metadata in achieving great search results, while realizing how inconsistent and labor intensive manual tagging is. This corporate-wide initiative for improving search will have huge payoffs in terms of increased reader retention and of course, increased revenue,” said Luc Filiatreault, President and CEO of Nstein Technologies. “Further, we are working with Scripps to assist them in exposing the metadata on the back-end as well – so editors and producers can assemble associated content quickly and easily.”
Nstein is the digital provider of choice for many of the world’s leading media companies, including: Conde Nast, Reed Business Information, Transcontinental Media and ImpreMedia.