In Factery Labs’ Search Engine, Facts Trump Links
Posted on November 17, 2009 |
Despite Google's inexorable gains in Internet search market share, search startups (and behemoths) keep trying to improve upon the search giant's results.
Factery Labs, debuting early Nov. 17, aims to pick up where Google leaves off. Instead of providing the usual list of Web pages, the Menlo Park (Calif.)-based startup reads all those pages first and then extracts facts from them by zeroing in on sentences--strings with a subject, then a verb--and assuming they represent facts of some kind. Then it creates an index of those facts and ranks them. The technology is called FactRank, in a nod to Google's patented PageRank.
"People want facts" out of their searches, says Factery Labs cofounder and President Paul Pedersen, a veteran of search engines such as Infoseek, Google, and Powerset and founder of data management firm Mark Logic. "They want to know right here and right now."
