Egyptian Startup Kngine Bets on Semantic Search
June 27, 2011
The Next Web has a couple of interesting recent articles regarding startups in Egypt. First, they announce that “Four Egyptian Startups Are US-Bound for Funding.” The fledgling companies include a couple of mobile services providers, a hardware accelerator enterprise, and semantic search engine Kngine.
According to the write up:
Sawari Ventures, an international venture capital firm, is behind the concept, and is supporting the four Egyptian startup companies as part of its efforts ‘to identify, serve, and provide capital for extraordinary entrepreneurs who are determined to change the MENA [Middle East/ North Africa] region.
We applaud the effort and wish all the startups luck; nothing boosts stability like successful businesses.
We, however, are particularly interested in Kngine, a semantic search provider, said to have already attracted an international following.
We keep asking, “Is semantic search the next big thing?”
Investors and influential blogs like Next Web track the space closely; for example, see the excellent write up “Semantic Web, Meet Middle East. Middle East, Meet Kngine!”
Revealing that Kngine is the first Middle Eastern semantic search engine, the article voices confidence in the product:
“The engine, while Middle Eastern focused, also works great on various global and international topics and can provide on-the-spot suggestions, related results and even calculates the average city weather per month. While it’s no WolframAlpha, Kngine has been entirely created by a two-person team. It could be a great Google/Wiki search alternative if you’re looking for quick and fast information, especially if it’s Middle Eastern related.”
Especially impressive are the robust support of complex queries and the ability to recognize Arabic. Though the results won’t be displayed in that language for another six months, the engine can connect Arabic words with their English equivalents.
You can take a tour of the service here.
Cynthia Murrell, June 26, 2011
You can read more about enterprise search and retrieval in The New Landscape of Enterprise Search, published my Pandia in Oslo, Norway, in June 2011.
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