Technology
Search today is based on words. A person enters a words into a search engine, and the search engine finds any pages that contain those words, ranks those pages according to its own algorithms, and returns its opinion of the best pages. Even the field of information retrieval, from which search engines emerged, is based on the concept of finding content that matches queries.
The problem is that search should not be about the words a person enters but about the meaning of those words. When a person enters words into a search engine, he is not asking for matches of words or even the most popular pages that contain matches of those words. He is asking for content that matches what he means by his query. As a result, unsatisfactory results are often returned that match the content of the query but not the meaning.
As a human I know that coffee, java, and cup of Joe can all mean the same thing, a process known a synonymy or being equivalent in meaning. I also know that the phrase "they were milking cows" can be talking can mean people were milking the cows or they cows were for milking. This is a process known as polysemy or having a diversity of meanings. Current computers can't make these types of distinctions, they can’t generalize concepts or guess at meanings. The future of search engines is in finding ways to mirror the mind. We must find ways for a search engine to know not just what I type but what I mean.
Humans tend to think in terms of groups. We have numbers, colors, and types. We have groups of friends, relatives, and acquaintances. We have types of music and genres of books. We have labels for everything and we tend to put these groups into hierarchical structures and parent-child relationships. We have music and then we have rock, classical, and country. These types of generalizations tell us communicate a great deal of information with a minimal amount of effort. If we want a search that can mirror the mind we need a search engine that knows categories.
Visvo is the only category search engine. Visvo automatically categorizes web pages into an ever expanding range of categories. When a user performs a search on Visvo they can narrow their search to a hierarchy of categories. This allows the user to focus their search to the specific type of information for which they are searching. For example if I do a search for tennis, I can narrow the search to news for tennis news, sports for information about tennis, health for the health benefits of tennis, shopping for buying tennis equipment, and so on.
Popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo base the relevancy of their search results on a complex formula of link analysis (PageRank) and other on-page and off-page factors. Visvo uses some link analysis to help determine relevancy of page content, but it is a minor factor. Category relevance is the major determining factor for pages in Visvo's index.
Visvo is the only search engine that has the ability to perform either automatic categorization or web content or categorized searches. Visvo currently has over 50 million pages indexes into 150 different categories and is continually increasing the depth and breath of its categories and the size of its index. As more and more categories are built out, users will be able to obtain more and more specific search results.
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