October 6th, 2008
Truevert stands on Yahoo!'s shoulders; learning to search for Green issues
Joining the growing band of search solutions built on top of Yahoo’s Build Your Own Search Search Service (BOSS) initiative, Truevert seeks to apply semantics in providing a particular slant on searches across Yahoo!’s index.
Topically, Truevert
“is focused on green, environmental concerns, social responsibility, recycling, global warming, etc. All searches are done from this point of view. For example, a search for ‘carbon’ returns documents about carbon’s role in global warming rather than about its physical chemistry.”
The site’s About page makes bold claims;
“Truevert is a truly semantic search engine. Semantic search aims to harness the meaning of words to provide more effective search results. Truevert has solved the problem of semantic search by learning the meaning of words directly from the documents that it reads rather than by relying on a prebuilt taxonomy, ontology, dictionary or thesaurus.
The goal of Truevert is to provide users with information that is focused on their interest. Truevert provides a scalable, accurate, and powerful semantic search technology.”
(my emphasis)
Hyperbole or a justifiable lack of modesty? Some of the search results are impressively on-target, but there’s still work to do…
Truevert is a demonstration of technologies developed by California-based OrcaTec, technologies that are claimed to
“[provide] focused search results because [they have] learned the meaning of words in the same way that people do–from the way that the words are used. Truevert does not depend on any artificial taxonomy, ontology, thesaurus, dictionary, or require document authors to categorize their content (as in the so-called semantic web). As a result, learning a new topic takes minutes on a single CPU, rather than 20 years of human effort or a hundred CPU months. Truevert is scalable and capable. It works in any language. Rather than restricting results to a small set of hand-selected sites, Truevert can retrieve any documents from anywhere on the Web.”
Paul Miller provides consultancy and analysis services at the interface between the worlds of Cloud Computing and the Semantic Web. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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