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by Sruthi Krishnan

What if you could ask any question and the Internet could give you an answer? All you need to do this is an ultimate knowledge engine.

The tasks it needs to do are straightforward — take raw data, convert it into a structured format and then use it to obtain knowledge. A tall order? Yes, but brave souls powered by grey cells are trying to tackle this head-on.

When you search for ‘India GDP,’ you could get around six million pages. The first page of results gives you around 10 results, from which you find the information you need.

What if the information was presented in a different fashion? Instead of a page with 10 links, you see a graph of India’s GDP over 10 years, comparison of India’s growth with that of other countries, and India’s GDP in five different currencies.

Wolfram Alpha, a computational knowledge engine, which is set to have a full-scale launch on May 18, says it will provide you with such answers. It is a product of Wolfram Research, founded by Steven Wolfram, a scientist and author.

“The key is presentation of results,” says Mahesh Murthy, founder of Pinstorm, a digital marketing firm, which is also into search engine advertising. Wolfram Alpha takes unstructured data and crunches it into an easy-to-understand format.

Wolfram Alpha’s backbone is Mathematica, a computational tool, which can perform complex scientific computation. Using this, Wolfram Alpha can not only compute a country’s GDP in various currencies but also calculate the weight of 100,000 molecules of salt and draw weather forecast graphs.

According to the pre-launch material, Wolfram Alpha has curated information from various sources and converted it into formats its computational engine can work on. The query is broken down into chunks, and Wolfram Alpha then decides what information you require. Taking inputs from different sources on the fly, the engine can compute results, which are provided in an accessible format.

But Wolfram Alpha is not a replacement for search engines, Mr. Murthy says.

Google’s search options

In the attempt to provide more relevant search results, Google has come up with a ‘Search Options’ feature, says Vinay Goel, Head of Products, Google India.

If you search for the number of Internet users in India, you will not want a study done in 2007. The ‘Search Options’ feature helps you filter results you want. “You can then see results within a year, or 24 hours, or the last hour,” he says.

Google Squared is another experimental product in Google labs, which aggregates a lot of data and provides the results in the form of a spreadsheet. If you want to search for digital cameras, you could get attributes such as pricing, availability and user reviews, packed into a single spreadsheet. The Wonder Wheel in Google labs is another product that provides a pictorial representation of related searches, he says.

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by Marion Arathoon and Anushree Chandran

The swine flu scare may be over, but some companies are looking to infuse an A/H1N1 strain—the technical name for the virus—into their advertising.

So, if purchases of Tamiflu, the Roche drug that fights the flu are regulated by the government, what can people do?

Ad inventory: A doctor uses a thermal scanner on a policeman in Mexico. There has been a spike in cold- and flu-related content being put out on websites, and traffic on these pages has also surged.Henry Romero / Reuters

For starters, they can wash their hands more often, says a microsite that is part of the website of Unilever Plc. brand Lifebuoy (www.lifebuoy.com).

“Swine flu? Not in my house. Have no fear with Lifebuoy,” says the microsite. The microsite was commissioned by Unilever to OgilvyOne.

“Lifebuoy globally is doing an educational activity…to educate consumers on how proper hand washing can help consumers protect themselves from swine flu,” said a Unilever spokesperson. “The microsite is one of the initiatives.”

An executive at an Indian agency, who is familiar with the development and who did not want to be identified, also claimed that Procter & Gamble Co. is working on a similar “swine flu” campaign for one of its brands.

Procter and Gamble India Ltd did not respond to emails from Mint on the subject.

Meanwhile, Kimberly-Clark Corp. has just broken ads for its Kleenex antiviral tissues on the swine flu theme in the UK on the back of the government’s mass door drop campaign: “Catch it, kill it, bin it”.

In Lifebuoy’s case, the executive said the microsite was an extension of the brand’s “keep your hands clean” campaign strategy running on traditional media and is part of the brand’s global hand-washing project conducted with the World Health Organization. This digital blitz is expected to have a positive rub-off on sales of liquid handwashing soap in various markets, including India.

The executive added that Lifebuoy plans to extend its campaign to digital screens in major airports across the world, and even on mobile phones of travellers using Bluetooth technology. The brand, he said, would follow up with its ads linked to searches on terms such as travel or Mexico.

There are already clear signs that the virus is set to become the marketing catchword of 2009, especially in the digital realm. According to Jay Sears, executive vice-president of strategic products and business development, ContextWeb Inc., which runs an online exchange for buyers and sellers of ad inventory, there has been a spike in cold- and flu-related content being put out by publishers. Traffic on these pages has jumped from almost zero to 400,000 a day, he claimed.

A similar trend can be seen in India. According to Mahesh Murthy, founder of Mumbai-based digital agency Pinstorm Technologies Pvt. Ltd, there was a 250% increase in volumes of online searches around swine flu around India between 25 April and 2 May. And the searches originate from all over India, even remote locations such as the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

Another expert said the spike continued well into May.

Tanay Tayal, director (product management) of digital agency Komli Media Pvt. Ltd said that between 26 April and 11 May, there were 1.5 million page views in India of articles on swine flu and at least 400,000 unique users who searched for something related to swine flu.

Till date, though, only international advertisers such as Red Cross and Pig333, a blog on pigs, AOL health advertising and National Public Radio are leveraging this search opportunity, said Murthy. He added that he sees a marketing opportunity here for Indian medical firms and products such as hand washes and disinfectants. Tayal concurs. “This could be an opportunity for pharma companies and companies that are promoting better lifestyle and hygiene.”

We created a questionnaire to find out more about the economic downturn in India and if it had affected your finances and thinking.

Those following us on Twitter will recall that we had promised to share results of the survey. We were glad to receive 112 responses. We believe the responses are a fair indicator of the questions asked in the survey.

Therefore, as promised, here are the unedited results of the survey, ‘Managing Finances Through The Downturn’. Click on the images for a larger graph:

(Click on the images to view a larger graph)

You can also view the HTML version of this report from here. Also, thanks to the following people for helping us spread the survey on Twitter: @Maheshmurthy, @Netra, @Asfaq, @Mekkanikal, @Jinadcruz, @amit3d, @viveksigh, @sumeet, @theanand, @fossiloflife, @just08in, @piyushgupta, @iqbalgandham, @dhempe, and @pujamadan. You can follow us here on Twitter: @Pinstormer.

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by Gouri Shah

Meet the Zoozoos, the stick-like figures with egg-like heads that appear in TV ads for Vodafone and have become all the rage in India.