Factery Search Extracts Facts

Take the newest search engine on the block for a spin. Launched today, Factery is not your father’s search engine: it doesn’t just throw up a raft of links. Instead it searches through a set of links to extract facts relevant to your query from the pages the links point to. At the moment, which is the alpha, experimental moment, Factery is pointed at those links that appear in Twitter and Yahoo Boss search results.

This is the kind of value added search functionality promised by semantic search engines — those that aim to understand syntax enough to recognize, in this case at least, facts. There’s a video that might help explain things better than I’m doing. And you might take a look as well at the stories about Factery in BusinessWeek, TechCrunch, and ReadWriteWeb.

Does it work? Well, yes. There are two pages where you can try out a search of your own. There’s the FacteryLabs search page, which seems to produce the most complete set of results currently available — though it’s really slow in doing so — and Factery’s Alpha Developer Sandbox, which is much faster though perhaps less complete. The latter gives you Twitter real time results that are not particularly “facts,” but rather mentions of your search terms.

Where you might find it most useful at the moment — that is, while it is still being developed and incorporated in other apps — is on your mobile browser for a quick cluster of data with fewer clicks and 3G waiting times.