Miiget: How it works?

Miiget is a people search engine based on a static people database that is enriched with visual content found on the web. Results are presented in a basic web interface alongside the Exalead.com image search engine and a “faces only” filter. The database currently features around 30,000 people.

Exalead offers the capacity to detect Named Entities and combine them with related images (in this case People), find content about them and display all of this in an ergonomic and visually pleasing graphic user interface (GUI).

Finding People

Exalead uses Wikipedia’s open-source encyclopedia of over 2,630,873 articles to find the freshest most reliable information. The database can also be downloaded in different formats, creating multiple ways to use the data. Exalead has developed a data-mining code that is flexible enough to detect people through different references such as name, birth date, occupation and the spelling variations of these terms.

Search results for Mother Teresa

Connecting People

Once people are identified, they are connected through search criteria of co-occurrence. For example, person A and B are defined as a “co-occurrence” if they both appear in the same article. Another article might contain persons B and C. Linking A to B and B to C creates a co-occurrence network of these 3 people.

The rules that define co-occurrence can be set according to desired criteria. For example, a stricter set of criteria may require the people to appear in the same sentence.

By linking the relationships between people in the articles, Exalead is able to build a complete network of relations. Once the query is sent, the people with the 10 most important direct relationships are displayed, based on the number of links found. By extracting the sentence where the link stands, we are able to determine the reason these people are connected.

Clicking on the “Relation” button gives you the option to see the explanation of a relationship between 2 people, based on the weight of the links.

Connection between Mother Teresa and Britney Spears

GUI

With the special “face refinement” feature on the Exalead.com image search engine, we are able to produce a variety of URLs that can be crawled and searched for a given name.

The whole GUI was built using simple HTML code, CSS style sheets and advanced JavaScript (with dynamic content loading, better known as AJAX) on top of the well known MooTools JavaScript library.

Pop-up windows and arrows appear on the interface, providing brief information about the relationship. Exalead has created an easy-to-use interface that is both visually pleasing and entertaining.