In case you have been under a rock for the past year and missed the new ‘hot topic’ in search, let’s get a quick overview and then talk about the new developments.  “Semantic Search” is explained by Wikipedia as the ability to:

“Understand what a user is searching for, word sense disambiguation must occur. When a term is ambiguous, meaning it can have several meanings (for example, if one considers the lemma “bark”, which can be understood as “the sound of a dog” or as “the skin of a tree”), the disambiguation process is started, thanks to which the most probable meaning is chosen from all those possible.  Such processes make use of other information present in a semantic analysis system and takes into account the meanings of other words present in the sentence and in the rest of the text. The determination of every meaning, in substance, influences the disambiguation of the others, until a situation of maximum plausibility and coherence is reached for the sentence. All the fundamental information for the disambiguation process, that is all the knowledge used by the system, is represented in the form of a semantic network, organized on a conceptual basis.”

Google has created seeming ubiquity in the online search industry it seems impossible that someone would be able to offer a TRUE alternative.  And no, please don’t count Microsoft’s Live Search as an alternative to Google, Live Cash is an alternative to Ebates.com.  However there are a few start ups that are gaining traction in the Semantic search market.

Fortune Small Business Magazine (yes, I know it’s a dying medium, but my wife won’t let me take the laptop into the bathroom) did a feature article on Powerset, who has positioned themselves as the leader in Semantic search.  Having 25 Ph.D.’s in the office working to help users find ‘exactly’ what they’re looking for doesn’t suck at all.  This three year old company has created the most buzz in this niche of the industry, however at this stage the service has received mixed reviews from users.  One of the main reasons is because the service currently only searches through Wikipedia.  However I did like the perspective from Powerset’s CEO, Barney Pell, he said that they are training the software to think like a human, and this “human” that they’ve been creating is currently a 2 year old, and it has to be given time to grow up.

Another company that received some recent coverage today from VentureBeat is TextDigger.  Raising an additional $3.5 million in funding in the past year, TextDigger claims to not only have working software, but an ability to monetize it.  They are not looking to attack Google though, instead they are focused on the media services division of the industry and actually providing their software for a fee to publishers.

As exciting as this industry is, it is still a baby in a land of giants, or I should say, one giant.