Internet News

Kngine - Stunning new Semantic Search Engine

Kngine - Web 3.0 Search Engine

I nearly missed this new search engine that aims to "unlock meaning" in search. Amazingly, this search engine comes to us from Cairo, Egypt. The about page says -

"We are working on next generation of searching technologies to unlock meaning; rather than indexing the document in Inverted Index fashion, Kngine tries to understand the documents and the search queries in order to provide customized meaningful search result."

"Our goal is to build Web 3.0 Web Search Engine on the advances of Web Search Engine, Semantic Web, Data Representation technologies -- a new form of Web Search Engine that will unleash a revolution of new possibilities."

The Tour page shows the ways this approach can assist in searches.

* Read Perception Words with Multiple Meanings.
* Smart Information.
* Available Results. NEW !
* Concept List (List of things).
* Answer your questions.
* Comparisons.
* Updated Information (Weather, Stock, Currency Price, and Sport Matches Results).
* Link the data, and view direct data.

There could be a Canadian connection. One of the sample questions is When did the Toronto Dominion Centre open (but the link that Kngine provides for this is a bad search - somebody is not good with detail.)

Kngine gets its reference and question-answering information from Freebase, web results from Google, and maps from Google.

You have to stay high level in your queries to see the concepts. There are none for exploring the Canadian Arctic, but Canadian Arctic as a search identifies one concept and several "nearest" concepts. The full treatment of a topic shows in this query for green living.

Choices for search are Web, Web with full information, and Photos. I haven't seen any difference in the two webs. The concept analysis doesn't apply to Photos - it seems to be the standard photo search.

I'm quite surprised that Kngine can answer questions like - top 10 countries for oil production, or top 10 countries for wheat. with a clickable map no less.

Since the web results are coming from Google, we can use Google's syntax. This can somewhat defeat the purpose of a semantic search engine, but may be helpful if you want pages from a domain: eg gov for US Government (site:gov), or ca for Canada (site:ca).

Kngine is very promising. For now it seems to deal with high level topics very well, and can handle some kinds factual questions. I don't know how far we can push that but it does a very good job on population of Toronto.

A note on the site reveals that "Kngine contains 1.2+ billion of pieces of data about more than 8 million concepts".

This is one to use and watch. Let's hope Kngine succeeds.

Posted by Gwen at February 18, 2010 01:16 PM