There were many times in my life where I wish I had known what to do. I felt like being trapped in the dark, and nobody else nearby can really answer the burning questions that I desperately seek answers to. Had I known the answers early on, life could've been much more different.
Maybe you've been in these kinds of situations where you're at a critical juncture, and you can't really decide which direction to take. If you only had a slight glimpse of knowledge about what may lie ahead, you could've made a better decision. Now you're full of regrets. You can't go back because you've missed the opportunity, or maybe there were too much already invested, or perhaps it was too painful to go back. You're stuck in this journey going into the abyss with no way out.
Lots of people out there are having these similar experiences as well. And they are encountering this in varying degrees. At the simplest level, some just need to decide on the healthiest sandwich to have for lunch. While some others are needing to resolve life-changing decisions, such as, what careers they should dedicate their lives to, or, whether they should rent a home versus purchasing one and therefore committing their next 30 years to a mortgage.
But, you only get to live life once. You can only afford a limited number of correct decisions that can impact your business, or profession, or your personal life. To make things worse, once these decisions were made, it may take a long time until you can course-correct it.
If you had known the appropriate knowledge beforehand, you could've made the best decisions, thus avoided venturing down this road in the first place.
Imagine if you had the knowledge of when the exact date and time it is to buy the cheapest airplane ticket, wouldn't you have traveled more to see the world and be with your loved ones?
Or if you've had the knowledge of whether to buy a particular stock based on the market conditions, wouldn't you have been a bit wealthier?
Or if you were selling a particular product, wouldn't you have made more money if you knew how much you should've charged, or features to have developed?
What if you knew that based on current market or hiring conditions, a particular skill set is trending upwards, wouldn't you have chosen the right
profession?
The list of scenarios of people needing to be empowered with knowledge goes on.
That is why we started AnswersEngine. We believe that valuable knowledge should be easily accessible to anyone, regardless if they can afford it, or have the expertise, or resources to do so. When people are empowered by relevant and crucial knowledge, they can make the best decisions in their life and allow them to take charge of their destiny and achieve great things.
I believe that the journey of life should be straight forward. If you know what you want in life, you should simply put the effort to go there without fumbling around and randomly taking wrong turns on every step of the way.
There is a massive amount of information scattered throughout the trillions of pages on the Internet. If that information can be extracted and organized, they can then be refined into valuable knowledge. Currently, it takes a lot of effort, money, and expertise to do this. As you already know, only a select few organizations in the world can carry on this massive undertaking.
Our mission at AnswersEngine is to extract knowledge from the whole public web by crawling the trillions of web pages and putting them in a centralized place. In doing so, people can extract this massive amount of data and collectively process them into pieces of valuable knowledge, and have them be easily accessible to others.
The first component to our mission is called Fetch, a web scraping platform that empowers developers to quickly build, deploy, and maintain web scrapers at a massive scale. Anytime a web scraper runs and fetches web pages from the Internet, we store them in a shared global cache. This large-scale cache acts as the foundation of how we can empower people to get access to knowledge with ease, and with affordability. Developers has the option to use as much or as little cache as needed. Obviously extracting data from the cache saves them time and money.
Crawling the web at massive scale takes a lot of resources in terms of time, money, and expertise, as it involves a whole stack of scalable technologies to be in place for it to run smoothly. We are pretty intimate with this experience since we have been providing web scraping services at scale for our consulting clients for the past eight years. So, we've architected Fetch to maximize developer happiness and engineered it to have high scalability based on our prior experience of building large-scale scraping systems.
The second component that we've created was the marketplace so that anyone can collectively contribute to the extraction of knowledge from the Internet. This is the place where developers can provide access to their web scraping scripts for free or for a fee. In doing so, they are empowering others by allowing them to reuse their scripts.
The third component that we've created is called Insights. This allows people to make sense of data by having an interface where data is represented visually through a straightforward question-and-answer format. They can ask questions such as "What is the average price of pizza in Chicago?" and Insights will display the answer to them.
With all of these components complementing each other, these empower people to take charge of their destiny through the knowledge that they've learned, and in a way that is easy and affordable.
Obviously, to achieve our vision is not going to be an easy feat. That is why we need your help. If this resonates with you, or if you've got a burning question to ask in which the answers may empower others, or if you have the skill sets to turn data into valuable knowledge, please don't hesitate to contact me. I'd love to hear your thoughts on how we can further this cause along.
This is an open invitation for us to have coffee together ( or Skype call ). My email is my first name @ answersengine.com.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Parama