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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Technology
Jack Schofield

WebFountain -- Monster librarian at work

"In the basement of IBM's Almaden Research Center in the hills of South San Jose, hundreds of computer servers gather 250 million new Web pages a week. The data -- 512,000 gigabytes' worth -- is at the disposal of a new analytical software tool called WebFountain," reports the Mercury News.

"Four years in the making, WebFountain is the ultimate way to figure out what everybody is saying about something. Created by researchers Dan Gruhl and Andrew Tompkins, WebFountain sifts through the online data to discover patterns that even the most dedicated librarian can't find."

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