An online tool that relies on grammatical
sentence structure to search and return similar topics across the Web was one of the search and discovery tools unveiled Monday at DEMO 09, a conference devoted to showcasing new products.
Evri has developed a tool that finds similar topics in articles--making a connection through words in content across blogs, Web sites, and audio and video clips. The technology enables users
to create lists of topics and relies on identifying subjects, verbs and objects in sentences to pull in the content. Similar to feeds from Twitter followers or Facebook friends, Seattle-based Evri
looks for content related to news and information from across the Web, rather than comments from friends, family and colleagues.
While users create topic lists in Evri, a downloadable add-on for
the Firefox or the Internet Explorer tool bars turns any site on the Web into a semantic Web page, according to Evri CEO Neil Roseman. "The algorithms read more than 30,000 unique news sources of
information," Roseman said. "We hope to read between 10% and 20% of the Web, which some have calculated at more than 10 to 50 billion documents."
Evri recently announced a partnership with
The Washington Post, placing the content recommendation widget on all the newspaper's articles.
Meanwhile, Foxmarks, a Firefox add-on for social bookmarks, has rebranded the company to
Xmarks and added a search feature that returns prequalified results based on topics that millions of users who belong to the community bookmark. Powered by more than 600 million bookmarks, the
technology analyzes the chatter and relies on consensus of the community to serve up information and recommendations in the Google search results page.
After downloading and installing the Xmarks
add-on, the technology relies on an icon to mark popular bookmarked sites in Google, MSN Live or Yahoo searches. The tool shows the number of people who bookmarked that site, as well as reviews and
ratings. Mousing over the icons reveals a thumbnail of reviews and information on the site. The Xmarks add-on should become available for Internet Explorer, Safari and Chrome browsers in the near
future.
There were 1.574 billion Internet users worldwide as of Dec. 31, 2008, with more than a third active in forum discussions, according to Internet World Statistics.
Another browser
add-on dubbed Kutano allows the network of users to write and insert comments, questions and complaints and place advertisements in the margins of Web pages, similar to footnotes or annotations. Only
Kutano users see each other's ads and annotations. The users control the size of the page, giving them control over the margins, according Tina Gonsalves, VP of marketing.
Gonsalves said the
company plans to launch a search feature in the coming weeks that will let users search on keywords in the notes on the margins. The ability to identify keywords allows marketers and advertisers to
follow users through their browsing history to target specific market segments.
It can identify the prior Web page a visitor landed on before arriving on Amazon.com, for example. Or it can follow
them from one comment to another on Web pages, blogs and social network sites. These features give advertisers and marketers an edge when targeting content to an age group that has a specific viewing
history and interests.
The company touts the tool as the "ubiquitous public forum for sharing information" and believes it can tap into the $22 billion Internet ad revenue market for 2008,
according to the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, an ad segment that still experiencing growth despite current economic conditions.