Project History

 

FreeLemonade was conceived in support of a challenge faced by a brilliant child.  The process of researching special  needs revealed how much evolution stands still before us in the Internet search space.  Although the opportunity for better search is general this experience led the founder to initiate a project designed specifically to help families in need of information on medical conditions. The solution is general and applicable to the general search market and the resulting technology  is a general facility that can in due course be applied to all search on the Internet.

 

The intial goal is to develop a tool for exploring health and medical conditions.  Research had reported over half of queries are part of open-ended exploration, yet this process is not directly supported in the search engines. 

 

We discovered a set of powerful underlying principles still undiscoverd by the major search engines.  We felt the possibility of helping those families most in need of information offset the obvious business challenge.  We undertook to build a focused crawler, implement natural language transducers, invent original algorithms, and to integrate all of it in a web offering.  Our patent work lays claim to what we have invented.

 

We were encouraged by a principle of information organization that we had held in mind for years.  We knew the history of Google, which emerged at a time when the general public believed that search was a basic commodity not susceptible to a game changing innovation.  Google surprised, reaching back with mathematical brilliance and new inventions, to the power of citation indexing, which Eugene Garfield had described and exploited so effectively in the field of information science.  Information reputation improved search in a game changing way.  Analogously, we discovered a profound principle which we believed could be used to radically improve search for those engaged in exploration.  The project was built to exploit this principle.

 

About PartnerServe

 

PartnerServe Company is defined by its emphasis on radical innovation for user benefit.  It was founded in 2000 in succession to a series of earlier inventions advancing computer capabilities in basic ways.  All of our endeavors aspire to create radical advantages directly evident to the user.  Original innovations now in general currency include the following:

• Establishment of the consumer review space (ConsumerDemocracy)
• Invention of helpfulness voting (e.g. Amazon etc.) on user content (ConsumerDemocracy)
• Finding salient issues of discussion in on-line communications (IssueFinder)
• Social networking for those who own the same thing whatever it may be (ThingMatch.com)
• Audio conversion simulating hearing loss from an audiogram for the families of the hearing impaired
• Hypertext outlining product for the personal computer (Questext)
• Dedicated natural language help for word processor commands (Silent Partner)
• Developed desktop search in the 1980s, two decades before the category was popularized by Google, with features that would still seem innovative today.

The Founder

 

The founder was Associate Professor of Linguistics at Memorial University of Newfoundland, publishing extensively on the Labrador dialect of the language of the Inuit (then 'Eskimo', properly 'Inuktitut').  Tenured and extensively published at an early age with many funded research projects, he also had an entrepreneurial bent and founded his first company, Information Reduction Research, for citation indexing as created by Eugene Garfield and later amplified so effectively by Google.  He hand built computers during the microcomputer revolution and widened an expertise in computational linguistics.  Inspired by the potential of computation he returned to New England to pursue new opportunities.  IRR introduced innovative products early during the microcomputer revolution including Questext, Silent Partner, and WP Toolset.  He later joined the Kurzweil AI team that introduced the first large vocabulary commercial voice recognition product.  He also created the first electronic dictionary for Houghton Mifflin.  On the strength of a host of industry awards, Larry succeeded as a consultant, winning additional awards for his clients.  In the nascent period of the Internet revolution he founded PartnerSoft Company to deliver consumer product reviews.  The ConsumerDemocracy effort led to imitation by several companies funded by tens of millions of VC dollars and it ultimately persisted and outlasted their demise.  He foresaw flaws inherent in the consumer review space and prevented an overextension of investment, and his effective predictions and decisions contrasted with the expensive collapse of well-funded competitors.  PartnerServe was soon founded to carry on the tradition of the original virtual organization.  IssueFinder, ThingMatch, and now FreeLemonade are among its new offerings.

 

Organization and Funding

 

PartnerServe is a virtual organization that is able to bring in the best talent on a per-project basis.  PartnerServe and Freelemonade are privately funded and able to pursue corporate values that include profitability and extend to radical innovation for the general good.