Beta List - Wednesday, January 30, 2008 12:51 - 4 Comments

TrueKnowledge: A semantic search engine

TrueKnowledge technology sidesteps this fundamental problem by providing a way for the world’s knowledge to be represented in a form that computers can understand and process, and for ordinary internet users to be able to add to this knowledge base without having to understand how the knowledge is represented.

Computers (unlike humans) cannot understand the content of web pages. As a result, finding information in the early 21st century still involves a process of guessing keywords that may appear in an appropriate web page and hoping that a search engine retrieves a document with the desired information sufficiently near the top of the list as to be found reasonably quickly. Simply asking a search engine for the desired information in the most natural way possible doesn’t produce a direct response. The response can also sometimes be a puzzling one. For example you searched for: “Who is Leo Leporte?”. Google and others may give you back results on Leo’s website and stuff about astrology.

The TrueKnowledge search engine is is in private beta now but when released the search engine will produce answers to your questions as well as the reasoning behind the results. Sounds pretty ingenius as the regular person often wonders why when I typed in this search did I get these odd results.

Founder William Tunstall-Pedoe has been working on this technology for the last 10 years. And was recently successful at raising funding to continue the project. I hope that this does perform as they claim and I think it will be a step in the right direction as to the future of semantic search. The search engine even claims an API which may be helpful to web developers. Have a look at the video to get a sense of what they are working on. Continue…