Evri, a Paul Allen backed semantic search engine, is launching into a limited beta tonight. Evri was first shown publicly at the D6 conference. Evri's CEO Neil Roseman likes to talk about Evri in terms of organizing content instead of calling it a search engine. At its core, however, Evri definitely is a search engine, though it adds a very sophisticated semantic layer on top of its results that emphasizes the relationships between different search terms.
In its early stages, Evri is only going to start out with a limited set of results and possible search terms, based on what it considers to be the most popular terms and people. This approach of starting with only the most popular terms is reminiscent of Mahalo. However, unlike Mahalo, which relies on paid editors and volunteers to create its results, Evri completely relies on its algorithms to create connections between people, products, concepts, and events.
Evri especially prides itself for having developed a system that can distinguish between grammatical objects such subjects, verbs, and objects to create these connections. In his demo at D6, Roseman described the system as being similar to "an army of 7th grade grammar students graphing the Web."
Evri is entering in direct competition with a number of recent entries to the semantic search market, especially Powerset and Hakia. Powerset, however, only indexes Wikipedia articles, while Hakia tries to index all of the web, but focuses less on the relationships between objects and more on providing highly organized results for a given term.
You can sign up for invites to Evri on their homepage. The first wave of users should be receiving invites tonight.
For a more in-depth look at the state of semantic search, see also Alex Iskold's article on the myth and reality of semantic search.
Comments
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Good news! I'm need to use evri :)
Posted by: Nirvana | June 24, 2008 9:03 PM
Looks like there is quite a bit of competition. Lets see if the marketing for Evri can get people to check it out.
Posted by: Mike | June 24, 2008 9:51 PM
Frederic Lardinois said...
Evri definitely is a search engine, though it adds a very sophisticated semantic layer on top of its results that emphasizes the relationships between different search terms.
Frederic, there is nothing new here. The technique they used has been around for a long time and it is called, Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). I have posted LSI in some of my comments here at RWW many times in the past. There are a few variants of LSI.
As far as I see, Roseman & Evri are just hyping to get VCs attentions.
The only thing that matters in the domain of search if one can show that his/her system has higher recall capability than his/her competitor or similar system out there. Unless Evri can state that clearly on their web site about some benchmark test (using publicly available dataset) to show that superiority, then it is nothing more than me too just to get into the booming hype of Web 2.0;
Posted by: Falafulu Fisi | June 25, 2008 2:00 AM
Frederic,
EVRI isn't doing anything like LSI - they're not conceptually clustering, they're not query expanding, they're just not doing dimensional reduction at all. Go to their beta and check it out - at the core, they're more in the entity-tagging space, coupled with link-based indexing and search, than anything like LSI/LSA or Random Indexing or any of the other bag-of-words based vector methods for "semantic search"
Posted by: anonymous interested party | June 28, 2008 10:46 PM
It's cool post! Thank you!
Posted by: Amateur | July 13, 2008 6:39 PM