Evri launches into open beta with new features
Seattle based semantic search company Evri launched into open beta today with a range of new features geared towards breaking out in a hyper competitive space.
At its base, Evri offers a semantic discovery engine that delivers grouped search results around a topic. Like any search engine, you enter the term you’re looking for, and it delivers results, but it a more user friendly fashion than Google. Here’s a couple of screen shots on various search terms I made on the site (including a vanity search) to give you an idea:
The results aren’t bad, although like any service of this type, the results aren’t as strong as the results you’ll get out of Google. There’s also no site matching in some results, so for example although I have a page, it never links me to The Inquisitr or even my own personal blog. It is however better than some I’ve previously seen.
Top of the new features with the move into open beta is the Evri content recommendation widget. The widget shows how the people, places, and things in an article are connected to other things on the web and in the news. From there, users can drill down within specific relationships and focus on just what interests them. The code can be embedded at a bar at the end of a post with a pop-up, with options for a sidebar or even full box coming shortly. If it sounds familiar, it looks identical to the widgets offered by Sphere, although obviously with a different base for results.
Evri has also unveiled the Evri Garden, billed as Evri’s technology playground, allowing those interested to directly interact with the same back end system Evri scientists and engineers use.
These sorts of semantic/ networked search type services have been popping up regularly over the last two years, and normally I’d be dismissive of most of them unless they completely wowed me. Evri doesn’t wow me, but it’s not half bad either, and even at this early stage it is most definitely usable. The company is led by ex-Amazon VP of Technology, Neil Rosema and counts Paul Allen as a lead investor, so talent and smarts isn’t lacking here. It’s not the next Google, but the needle is slightly pointing to the winner side when considering its future.
