Omnity: A Worry for the Googlers?

January 8, 2016

A New Year. Another Google challenger. Anyone remember Qwant.com which kept Eric Schmidt awake at night? Yep, right.

I read “Semantic Search Engine Omnity Reckons It Can Beat Google.”

The write up had a great phrase: Tyranny of the taxonomy.”

This should make the purveyors of Boot Camps, software, and human controlled term schema developers perspire. Well, maybe only a little on the upper lip.

The new sheriff is Omnity described this way:

Omnity is a new kind of search engine that asks the question: What if, instead of searching for keywords like “baseball scores” or “best-rated Nintendo 64 games,” a search engine let users search across disparate documents, from Wikipedia pages and news articles to patent filings and PDFs, in order to find shared interconnectedness?

The method used? The article reports:

when Omnity searches across documents, it throws out “grammatical glue but semantic noise”—commonly used words like “the,” “he,” “she,” or “it.” Stripped of this “noise,” Omnity is then able to analyze the remaining “rare words” to find common threads that link together different documents.

Once the company works out the name confusion with the 3D utility product, the system will be easier to find online. Check it out at https://www.omnity.io/.

If Mr. Schmidt is reading this blog post, now you can dream about Qwant and Omnity.

PS. The write up had a wonderful quote from the founder of Omnity, Brian Sager, which I reproduce here:

“I use Google every day and it’s great, but no, we’re more likely to buy Google.”

Worry, Mr. Schmidt. Worry.

Stephen E Arnold, January 8, 2016

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