Semanti Corp., a web services provider offering “find” technology to enhance the results of search engines, announces its flagship product, SemantiFind.

SemantiFind is a web service that enhances the search engine experience by letting users indicate the precise meaning of their search queries. The service works within preferred search engines, and it offers a drop-down list of specific terms and definitions that help people select what they mean, such as “Visa” the travel document instead of “Visa” the credit card. By understanding a user’s meaning, SemantiFind is designed to return more meaningful and relevant information and save people the hassle of sifting through unwanted pages or reformulating their queries to find results that might be buried.

As users begin typing in the search bar, they can predefine exactly what information they want to retrieve through SemantiFind’s drop-down list, which contains millions of terms and their definitions. Once users find pages they like, they can indicate quality results with a simple click of the “Symantify” button. “Semantified” pages are included as part of the user’s future searches, making it easy to find valuable information again. Each Semantified page also becomes available to the SemantiFind community, enriching everyone’s search experience. SemantiFind prioritizes pages that were Semantified by a user’s invited friends above those of the rest of the community because they are likely to be more relevant. This approach uses the “wisdom of the crowds” to sort out the good pages from the bad.

SemantiFind is available now for download at www.semantifind.com. It is a free service to consumers. The product is currently available for use with Google, but additional search engine support is expected to become available within the next 30 days. Semanti Corp. is headquartered in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

Let’s take a look at their DEMO video:

Source: Semanti Corp.

Keren Dagan contributes his analysis of SemantiFind:

SemantiFind from Semanti Corp offers to help people building search query with less ambiguity. The way it works is very simple. The SemantiFind toolbar integrate with the search box (no matter what is the search engine) and when the user type a word like “search” it offers multiple combinations using this word like: Search Engine, Searchbar, Search bot and more.

The benefit to the user is twofold, the first is to reduce the anxiety around building search queries and the second is to increase the relevance of the search results.

This application addresses both of the pain points in the search task: knowing how to ask for information and sifting through irrelevant results.

In this picture you can see the options that SemantiFind offers for the word “Tape”.  You can also see that SemantiFind come up with its own results for this term. The SemantiFind results are located between the sponsor (ads) results and the organic search results. The examples for ambiguous search terms are endless, here are few: stock, hibernate, apple, phenomenon, Kennedy (yes they support names too).

The product launched its product on at DEMOfall 08 in San Diego, California. It is now in an open for all beta stage. The toolbar only works on FireFox and Google at this point but as their homepage claim “support for IE and other search engines (Yahoo, Microsoft Live Search) will be available in approximately 30 days”. No words about Chrome yet.

From the company web site: Mission

“Semanti’s mission is to create the simplest and most intuitive way for people to find the exact information they want on the Internet in the shortest time possible.”

Additional  features:

• The user can label search results, retrieve selected pages later and filter those using this label (labeling seems similar to tagging).
• The user can see results from other SemantiFind users search results. I did not try inviting my friends (there is a limit to their patience) so I don’t know how the social capabilities works. My suggestion for the Semanti team is to expose some “featured” searchers so people can invite them and see the Semanti crowd sourcing value.

I know that the application is in an early beta phase and as expected I noticed several issues, mainly with the search box integration.  Yet, in most cases it did a nice job helping Google to focus.

Few thoughts:

• The SemantiFind metaphor remind me in a way the InteliSense technology that exist today in IDEs like Microsoft Visual Studio.
• Google offers the “did you mean?” feature for cases that the user misspelled a term. I don’t think that the spelling correction/suggestion and the semantic suggestion compete with each other. Actually, I think that they complement one another. I would love to see the same capability in SemantiFind. I mistyped accidentally the word “stock’ and I did not offer any suggestion.
• I guess that the SemantiFind results area is where we should expect sponsor results or ads.
• Behind the toolbar there is a web service. Is there a plan to open the API? Half of the service value is in its interactive capabilities but the way content and categories were organized in SemantiFind database, could be something tempting to tap into and mashup with other search results.
• The browser toolbars area is getting crowded but I think that in this case SemantiFind found the right way to sneak in before and after Google search. This is a nice way around Google.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Innovations, Newcomers, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Sphere: Related Content