<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"Symbolab is a search engine for students, mathematicians, scientists and anyone else looking for answers in the mathematical and scientific realm. Other search engines that do equation search use LaTex,\u00A0the document mark up language for mathematical symbols which is the same as keywords, which unfortunately gives poor results.\r\n\r\nSymbolab uses\u00A0proprietary\u00A0machine learning algorithms\u00A0to provide the most relevant search results that are theoretically and semantically similar, rather than visually similar. In other words, it does a semantic search, understanding the query behind the symbols, to get results.\r\n\r\nThe nice thing about math and science is that it\u2019s universal \u2013 there\u2019s no need for translation in order to understand an equation. This means scale can come much quicker than other search engines that are limited by language.\r\n\r\nI interviewed Michal Avny, the CEO of Symbolab, to find out more about this new search engine.\r\n\r\nTell us about your background. Is this the first time you\u2019ve founded a company?\u00A0\r\n\r\nI\u2019m a technologist and entrepreneur\u00A0at heart. I was the CEO of Relegence IL, a pioneer in the real-time search technology, and lead it to a successful acquisition by AOL in 2006.\r\n\r\nHow did you find / pull together the team?\r\n\r\nAdam and Lev are longtime friends. When I met them I instantly knew this is a winning team to build a new startup. We are all mathematicians, and Lev and myself have years of experience with search engines. Among the three of us we had all the know-how to build Symbolab. Adam is the scientist responsible for the patents and algorithm development, Lev is the techy doing most of the development and I\u2019m responsible for the strategy &amp;amp;amp; operations. We all have capabilities that overlap, we complement each other.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nWhere did the idea for Symbolab come from?\r\n\r\nSymbolab emerged from Adam's\u00A0frustration as a graduate student. He found there was no good way to search mathematical content on the Internet. When Adam first mentioned this it immediately clicked. I come from the world of search and information retrieval, where you deal with text, but scientific symbols and notations are an untouched ground.\r\n\r\nYou come from the world of search \u2013 tell us more about that.\r\n\r\nI come from the world of information retrieval, where you not only search for documents but you also try to automatically understand for instance the entities and topics of a document and the relationships between them. I was forming real-time search systems before 'real-time' was a common term. My passion is with search and information extraction.\r\n\r\nGoogle uses mainly keyword search, Symbolab uses semantic. Why is semantic search important for mathematical / scientific search?\r\n\r\nSemantic search is important because science is a language with its own syntax, grammar and vocabulary. Each symbol can mean different things within and across disciplines, order and position of elements matter, priority of features, etc.\r\n\r\nKeyword search that works pretty well on text doesn\u2019t work as well on scientific expressions.\r\n\r\nYou say &amp;quot;Each symbol can mean different things within and across disciplines, order and position of elements matter,\u00A0priority of features, etc.&amp;quot;\u00A0 Can you give an example of this?\r\n\r\nE=mc^2 \u00A0in this example m is an independent variable, \u00A0y=mx \u00A0in this example\u00A0m is a constant, \u00A0$\\sum _{m=1}^{\\infty }\\left(\\frac{1}{m^2}\\right)$ \u00A0 in this example m is an integer variable\r\n\r\n(x+a) \u00A0in this example a is a constant, \u00A0(a+b) \u00A0in this example a is an independent variable\r\n\r\nu(x+y) \u00A0u can be either a variable multiplied by (x+y) \u00A0or a function of (x+y)\r\n\r\nx/y is not\u00A0equal\u00A0y/x \u00A0but x+y is\u00A0equal\u00A0y+x\r\n\r\nx2 is different from x^2 different then x_2 \u00A0position of 2 (superscript or subscript) defines\u00A0the context\r\n\r\n(x+y)^2 \u00A0is the same as (x+y)(x+y)\u00A0or \u00A0x^2+2xy+y^2\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nWhat other search engines do equation search?\r\n\r\nThere are no open web equation search engines\u00A0per se, but there are some examples of limited equation search capabilities:\r\n\r\nGoogle and Bing LaTex search support to some extent, but as keyword search:\r\n\r\n\tKeyword search (using LaTex) on Springer journals.\r\n\tText search on a set of equation dictionary.\r\n\tLaTex search, small set of equations covered.\r\n\r\nWhat\u2019s the business model?\u00A0\r\n\r\n\tEnterprise search \u2013 the enterprise search market revenue is estimated at $2.5 billion USD with a growth of 22% per year.\r\n\tDigital library services \u2013 there are around 3,000 institutions worldwide that spend on average approximately 1.2 million USD each on digital content.\r\n\tWeb search \u2013 we believe that a mathematical notations search engine publicly available on the web can make the biggest impact on how we search and discover scientific content, it is essential for a wide population worldwide including high school students, college students, researchers and professionals. We estimate the page views per day as being 4% of the total of Google traffic.\r\n\r\nDo you plan on building an ad network?\u00A0\r\n\r\nWe do have plans to build an ad network. Leading scientific publishers are making billions of USD a year from advertising.\u00A0Scientific content is one of the most expensive forms of digital content available today.\r\n\r\nWhat about Wolfram Alpha?\u00A0\r\n\r\nWolfram is great, but it\u2019s a knowledge base not a search engine. It\u2019s very much like comparing Wikipedia to Google.\r\n\r\nWhat do you think of people who claim women aren\u2019t good at math?\r\n\r\nIgnorant. Women are as good as men in math &amp;amp;amp; science. We also don\u2019t see that many women entrepreneurs. It is not about capabilities, women are just as capable. I truly believe the nature of the problem is in the education system. There are still different expectations from women than from men. Symbolab can open a window to science and help women overcome the barrier of the scientific language.\r\n\r\nYou just closed an investment. From who? How much?\r\n\r\nWe closed 500,000 USD in May\u00A02011\u00A0from a group of investors in Israel and London. The group is lead by Micha Malka, former CEO of\u00A0Harel Finance.\r\n\r\nWhat do you wish someone told you when you started as an entrepreneur?\u00A0\r\n\r\nFind the right people and don\u2019t compromise. Keep it lean, very lean.\r\n\r\n\u27A4\u00A0Symbolab\r\n\r\nImage credit: Getty Images"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/10/08/the-guys-from-the-big-bang-theory-will-love-mathematical-search-engine-symbolab/>