Bing, Google, And The Enigmatic T2: The Race For A Complete Semantic Search Engine

Yesterday, Bing released a surprisingly useful new feature around recipe search . If you search for "Chicken," you can narrow the results down by "chicken recipes" and then a whole bunch of new filtering options appear down the left-hand column. You can further narrow results by recipe rating, cuisine (vegetarian, Spanish, Southwestern), convenience (quick/easy, family, entertaining), occasion (wedding, Valentine's Day), main ingredient, course, or cooking method. Bing is big on guided search (showing relevant search categories to help narrow results), but this goes one step further towards semantic search (the ability to index and search the Web by different facets). Recipes are just the beginning, and it's not just Bing. Google and a handful of startups, including Evri , Hakia , and Radar Networks , are hard at work on making semantic search a reality. The race is on to bring this type of semantic filtering for nearly every category of search across the Web. In fact, Bing's recipe search looks a hell of a lot like T2 , the semantic search engine being developed in private by Radar Networks. The startup currently offers a semantic bookmarking application called Twine which is on autopilot, but T2 is much more ambitious. Not many people have seen T2, but CEO Nova Spivack once gave me a demo and I took a bunch of screenshots like the one above (there are also slides on the Web). When you search for "chicken" on T2, you can also narrow by difficulty level, meal, main ingredient, dietary option, cuisine, course, and so on. Recipes happens to be one of T2's strong suits. It has perhaps the largest semantic indexes of recipes in the world with 300,000 recipes. But it is also building out its semantic search index for video games, movies, music, travel, health, sports, and other category verticals.