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 44th 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.”
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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