Ron Miller
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Semanti is a new tool that adds a semantic layer to your Google, Bing or Yahoo search. Instead of trying to be a new go-to search engine, Semanti is a Firefox browser plug-in that operates within your existing search engine, letting you select the context of your search, select results that you consider the best and share your results with friends through a Facebook connection to bring a social aspect to the tool. (See below for an image of what the browser button looks like.)

Finding the Right Words

One of the classic semantic search scenarios is finding the meaning of a word that has multiple contexts. In their demo video (click here to watch it on YouTube), Semanti uses the example of entering the search “apple.” Do you mean the computer, the record company, the fruit or Gwyneth Paltro’s daughter? By building a layer on top of the search engine, as you type the Semanti tool offers you a series of possible results based on their pre-built ontology. If you meant apple, the fruit, you select that, and the results you get should filter to show the fruit-related ones first. And the next time you search, it remembers that you were searching for fruit and places that option at the top of the search box, no matter which search engine you use (because it’s linked to the browser, not the search tool).

“Human beings trump machines when it comes to classifying,” says Bruce Johnson, CEO at Semanti. “When you ask a simple question of a search engine, there are limits that the search engine couldn’t possibly understand,” he says.

Johnson is careful to point out that Semanti is not replacing the search engines, but augmenting them. Semanti may filter some results to show only the ones relevant to your search, but you can always see the filtered results at the bottom of your search results window.

Controlling the Results

Semanti, not only filters the results, it also provides a tool to mark the pages from your results, that you think are the best ones. That way, when you conduct that search again, the results you like best show up at the top of the search results page in the Semanti section.

When you find a site you like, you click the Semanti button in your toolbar and it saves it so it appears in the list of favored results the next time you make a search.

Johnson says this tool was created as a conscious effort to improve upon bookmarking. Rather than storing a link to the site in a separate place where it may be difficult to find, it places the link in context in the list of the results. If you find a site is no longer relevant, you can simply remove it.

Semanti also includes a page preview for each result, whether one from the search engine or from your Semanti list of results. What’s more, you can remove any result that aren’t relevant from the main list and these get stored in the filtered list that appears at the bottom of the screen. So if you’re searching for Genesis the band (see below) and you get Genesis, the Bible book, you can filter the Bible results to narrow the result to only those that include the band. You can always add the filtered results again later if need be.

Making it Social

Semanti also has a social angle, so not only can you see your own saved results, you can see those from your Facebook friends with whom you have chosen to share results. That way, if you’re searching for a restaurant, says Johnson, rather than having the recommendations of strangers (as you do on a service like Yelp), you can see which restaurant your friends have chosen in a given search category. Johnson believes this provides a way for you to generate a list of more trusted results (even if it’s because you know you can’t trust a given friend’s taste in restaurants).

Semanti provides a relatively unobtrusive way to add semantics to your search while still using your favorite search engine. Note that you have to be on the search engine site for the search classification to work correctly. It won’t work in a toolbar add-in, but overall, it’s an interesting way to narrow your search results to a list that matters most to you, while using social aspects to help you make a choice when you need it.

After you save results by clicking the Semanti button, these results appear in a list at the top of the results page. In this example, the Genesis band search has these saved results.

After you select an option, Semanti remembers and places it at the top of the list. In this instance, it remembers I searched for Genesis.

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