TextDigger will be launching its semantic search engine at DEMO today. TextDigger is not another one in the series of startups that are launched every now and then claiming Google is pretty bad at what it does and they will make sure that the injustice is stopped. TextDigger does something important which adds gives an interesting dimension to search space- Search engine being able to find similar words in context to the keywords your searched for. And these are not the keywords taken out of thesaurus we are talking about. Take the case when you are search for “hotel with a view”. The keyword has various dimensions to it – View as in “point of view”, View as used in engineering drawing, and more. However what a user is looking for is pointers in the direction of “vista”, “panorama”, “landscape”……, which a user might not recall and needs at that point of time.
When you search at TextDigger for any string, it will come up with all regular search results, and on the top of the page gives you the semantic results that can help you refining your search results. TextDigger will be initially opening up the search engine to a select group of beta testers. Semantic part of the search results will operate in a social search fashion with the users having the ability to edit and add to the semantic search index. In case you are wondering about the how they going about building their search and semantic index – TextDigger has built the semantic search engine ground up, while partnering with Gigablast to deliver the regular search results.
Coming to the short history of TextDigger – based out of San Jose, CA, TextDigger was officially started off early last year by 3 lead CNET engineers. Till date TextDigger has received funding from CNET and several angel investors but haven’t done a VC round of funding. Currently TextDigger has 6 people onboard, with varied background in CS, linguistics, and philosophy which gives it a balanced outlook at how users perceive search to be.
Powerset, and Phrasetrain have been working similar problem with slightly different focus in each case. TextDigger team works a lot around linguistics while other might try to solve them the perspective of grammar.
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TextDigger
February 19, 2007 at 11:18 pm |
[...] Semantic Web is the buzzword these days. TextDigger, Radar Networks, Boorah, PowerSet, Adaptive Blue are just some of the startups working on semantic web variations. Another semantic web contender Systemone today launched their first consumer facing Similarity Engine named Infolust. The initial launch is very basic. Right now all you can do is feed in the URL of a page for which you want more details, and Infolust will quickly analyze to come back with 10 related pages from Wikipedia. As I mentioned before the this is an alpha product so it is not yet ready for prime time. From the few search queries I ran most of the results were way off track. So lot of work needs to done in that aspect, which even Systemone openly admits. Besides this, Systemone will be adding more content sources beyond the Wikipedia domain. Even if Systemone can get Wikipedia part working right, it will be big improvement over the standard Wikipedia search which is no one’s favorite. [...]
August 24, 2007 at 2:53 am |
[...] Many of you probably already know I am referring in part to what Tim Berners-Lee called the Semantic Web. Numerous start-ups and seasoned web veterans are fast at work on developing protocols for just such a machine readable global database. In fact, this year there already are or will be several beta versions from hopeful Semantic Web wranglers; Radar Networks, TextDigger, Theseus in Germany and many many others. W3C has a dedicated Semantic Web Activity News blog that is worth subscribing to just for its window into the official side of things, with technical specs, links to rules for interoperability and notes on large-scale projects. [...]