Factery Labs, a search technology company, today announced the launch of its FactRank technology, a new way for people to find information on the web. Currently if one enters a query into a search engine, the response is a list of blue links. FactRank goes well beyond just delivering links: for each search query the FactEngine extracts facts from recommended pages and builds a FactIndex ranked by authority. FactRank can be used at www.facterylabs.com, and developers can use the API at apiwiki.facterylabs.com.

“Old fashioned search engines don’t work well in the real-time web. Communities are taking over the job of recommending URLs,” said Paul Pedersen, founder and president of Factery Labs. “What’s missing is a way to cut through the noise of community recommendation: Which users should you trust, which pages contain the best facts, and what are those facts?”

Using an old-fashioned search engine, a user who searches for information on Barack Obama will get a list of links to various web pages. Using FactRank, a user gets a list of facts including:

• He was born at Kapi'olani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu;
• He is the 44^th president of the United States; and
• On February 17, 2009, he signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

This is especially useful for mobile applications where having to click back and forth between links is very cumbersome.

“Link-based algorithms are very effective for the static web, but they do not transfer to the real-time web,” Pedersen continued. “Imagine a voting situation where anyone can vote for anything whenever and however often they want. The web is a huge structured fact base but we’re looking at wrong structure when we look at things like markup. Markup allows machines to process and render but doesn’t necessarily help humans make sense of what’s retrieved in a search. FactRank uses a different structure embedded in the web that is intended for human consumption: grammatical sentences.”

The Factery API gives developers a way to make sense of the raw stream of real time data. sobees, a powerful social desktop aggregator, implemented the Factery API which enables sobees’ users to extract factual information from the real time Twitter stream.

“With Factery’s API we’re able to enrich our real time Twitter search,” said François Bochatay, CEO of sobees. “And our users are able to easily get facts and a ranking of those facts from their friends’ Twitter feeds. It’s more immediate and it’s frankly, more interesting.”

For more information about Factery, please visit www.facterylabs.com.

About Factery

Factery has developed FactRank technology to mine real-time feeds and web content for the purpose of providing simple, short answers to user queries. Factery was founded in April 2009 by Paul Pedersen and Sean Gaddis, building on their research and experience at Google, Powerset, eBay, & Skype. In September 2009, Factery announced $1.2 million in seed funding from US Venture Partners, SV Angel, Aydin Senkut, Maurice Werdegar and Frank Caufield, Jr. For more information about Factery, please visit www.facterylabs.com.

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