NetBase Offers Powerful Semantic Indexing Platform That Reads The Web

Description

NetBase Offers Powerful Semantic Indexing Platform That Reads The Web

by Erick Schonfeld on April 22, 2009

Regular search engines such as Google and Yahoo use statistics to make sense of the Web. They count links, keywords, and other items on a page to determine its rank in search results. Semantic search engines try to actually understand the meaning of the words found on the Web and other documents to bring back the most relevant results to a query. Microsoft bought Powerset for $100 million to gain semantic search expertise, but so far all it can search is Wikipedia. . Hakia, Textwise, and other startups are also working on semantic search. Now comes NetBase , which brings a slightly different approach that its says can scale to the entire Web.

NetBase has been around for a while. Originally called Accelovation, it has raised $9 million in two rounds of venture funding over the past four years, has 30 employees, and counts among its current customers P&G, Caterpillar, 3M, BP, Kraft, BASF, and Goodyear. It is now changing its name and offering its core semantic indexing technology as a platform for other companies to build their own products. Already, scientific publisher Elsevier uses NetBase to power its Illumin8 research tool for searching scientific articles, patents, and Websites.

NetBase takes a sophisticated linguistic approach, actually diagramming sentences to determine the relationship between words and phrases. It does particularly well with causal relationships, allowing it to tease out cause and effect from raw text. For instance, in the sentence, “The calcium, potassium and magnesium found in yogurt can help reduce your risk for hypertension often resulting from stress, obesity, and other factors” NetBase can identify that “stress” and “obesity” are causes of hypertension and that “calcium,” “potassium,” “magnesium,” and “yogurt” can be ...

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http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/22/netbase-offers-powerful-semantic-indexing-platform-that-reads-the-web/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/22/netbase-offers-powerful-semantic-indexing-platform-that-reads-the-web/