Sneak Peak At T2, Twine’s Semantic Search Engine

Extracting meaning from the Web is huge project that is very difficult to do at large scale. Keyword search only skims the surface of meaning locked in Web pages. Various semantic search technologies try to go deeper by adding structured data to web pages so that the Web can be treated more like a database. But adding semantic metadata to the Web is laborious and time-consuming. Just look at Twine . It's approach so far has been to add semantic data only to the Web pages members save to the service. While it appeared like Twine was finally getting some traction earlier this year, it's fallen by the wayside. Traffic is way down (see chart below), partly because it is no longer buying traffic with ads and partly because of changes to the way Google indexes the site. Bottom line is that is that beyond a hardcore following of about 250,000, Twine does not have broad appeal. But CEO Nova Spivack and his team at Twine have been busy working on something else entirely, to the point that the current Twine service is pretty much on autopilot. In the video after the jump, Spivack gives a sneak peak at what his team has been working on. Codenamed T2, it is complete departure from the navel-gazing approach of Twine 1.0. It is a big step towards creating a semantic search engine that might eventually scale across the Web—exactly the kind of swing for the fences type of idea we like to see at TechCrunch. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco