Old Wine: Semantic Search from the Enlightenment
June 24, 2015
I read a weird disclaimer. Here it is:
This is an archived version of Pandia’s original article “Top 5 Semantic Search Engines”, we made it available to the users mainly because it is still among the most sought articles from old site. You can also check kids, radio search, news, people finder and q-cards sections.
An article from the defunct search newsletter Pandia surfaced in a news aggregation list. Pandia published one of my books, but at the moment I cannot remember which of my studies.
The write up identifies “semantic search engines.” Here’s the list with my status update in bold face:
- Hakia. Out of business
- SenseBot. Out of business.
- Powerset. Bought by Microsoft. Fate unknown in the new Delve/Bing world.
- DeepDyve. Talk about semantics but the system is a variation of the Dialog/BRS for fee search model from the late 1970s.
- Cognition (Cognition Technologies). May be a unit of Nuance?
What’s the score?
Two failures. Two sales to another company. One survivor which has an old school business model. My take? Zero significant impact on information retrieval.
Feel free to disagree, but the promise of semantic search seems to pivot on finding a buyer and surviving by selling online research. Why so much semantic cheerleading? Beats me. Semantic methods are useful in the plumbing as a component of a richer, more robust system. Most cyberOSINT systems follow this path. Users don’t care too much about plumbing in my experience.
Stephen E Arnold, June 24, 2015
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