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Google may be synonymous with web search, but it sure isn’t perfect. Unless you’re looking for something very specific and pretty simple, exploring larger topics can still be a time-consuming and painstaking process — even if the average web surfer isn’t too put off by it. Other companies, though, have spied this as an opportunity to build better (or at least different) search experiences. Microsoft Corp., for instance, recently launched Bing, which includes a sidebar window that tries to help you hone and refine your search. Other more obscure web services, such as WolframAlpha’s overhyped “computational knowledge engine,” take ambitiously different approaches to finding and presenting information online.
And then there’s Primal Fusion Inc., a low-profile 35-person startup in Waterloo, Ont. Founded in 2004, it is trying to automate how people gather and organize online information. At its core, Primal Fusion’s technology infers meaning from the words used to conduct an online search. Its first application — still at an early stage of development and not even open to the public, yet alone ready for commercialization — takes a single search term and generates a series of related terms, as derived from information sources such as Wikipedia, Yahoo web results, or even Flickr. By selecting which of those related terms reflect your interests (and those terms’ related terms, and so on), you, the searcher, create what Primal Fusion calls a “thought network,” which more explicitly defines what information you seek. Computer servers harvest not just highly relevant results, but also organize the customized information into its own web page, document or RSS feed. “If you can automate that whole process of searching and organizing,” says company CEO Yvan Couture, one of six local angel investors financing the bulk of Primal Fusion, “more time is spent on the consumption of information.”
The company is part of a larger trend in the evolution of online technologies that’s known as the semantic web, a term coined by Tim Berners-Lee, the British engineer widely credited with creating the World Wide Web, to describe computers comprehending and acting upon content beyond a set of keywords. The current approaches are cumbersome and hard to scale across the whole web, though. Primal Fusion’s approach — letting users determine how terms interrelate, rather than websites themselves imposing predefined semantics — is a twist. And it’s one that’s so enticing that it even lured an 11-year semantic technology veteran from Microsoft in Redmond, Wash., to a puny pre-revenue Canadian tech company in mountainless southwestern Ontario.
Couture and company founder Peter Sweeney, a University of Toronto business grad self-taught in semantic technologies, see Primal Fusion as providing the “electricity” to power the next evolution of the web, or as some call it, Web 3.0. The challenge is — you guessed it — commercializing the technology. Couture and Sweeney want to build a consumer web platform upon which other companies will build applications that use Primal Fusion services and semantic data under a pay-for-what-you-use, or “metered” model. First, though, the company needs its own applications, partly to prove its concepts, but also in hopes of generating revenue (and profits) through advertising or content licensing.
But those business models, like Web 3.0 itself, are still evolving, and Primal Fusion first needs to prove its technology has the right stuff. Then, its investors hope, earnings will follow; even Google didn’t start with advertising.
Google, of course, is the elephant in the room, as it is for any technology that’s trying to change how people glean information online — be it Bing, WolframAlpha or something out of a small outfit in Waterloo.
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