VentureBeat

TextDigger, a semantic search startup that launched early last year at DEMO, has been much quieter in the interim than other companies in the space like Hakia, Powerset and Radar Networks / Twine. But now the company has come back to light, at least for us — a filing document reveals that the company has finally landed venture funding, raising $3.8 million so far.

A year or two ago, it wasn’t uncommon to hear the term “Google killer” applied to companies like TextDigger. Expectations have since fallen somewhat, and most of the semantic startups have struck out in directions other than plain-vanilla web search.

TextDigger landed on media services — no surprise, given that it was founded by former CNET employees. The company tells me it’s making the most progress with automated tagging and keyword generation, which help websites become more structured and show up higher on search rankings. Another product, a related search technology that helps visitors navigate a site, has also gotten interest.

The products are completely developed, they say, and open to any publisher that wants to sign up. TextDigger makes money by charging for all three offerings, following a trial period; related search is charged per 1,000 queries, while auto-tagging and keyword generation are charged per query or tag. It will add self-serve tools this summer to help streamline and automate the process of signing up for the services.

It’s encouraging to see TextDigger making some progress, and figuring out how semantic tech can feed hungry (investor) mouths. But notably, it hasn’t entirely given up on the idea of web search. Although the search segment of their website is closed to the public, when I asked whether the company had given up, a company exec responded that working on search and navigation on other sites would ultimately improve their web search, writing, “If and when we launch a public Web search, at a later date, it will certainly be much better for having incorporated the fruits of our labors in these other service areas.”

By contrast, Hakia, which launched around the same time (our first coverage on the two was in the same article), has continued to make web search the core of its business, with new offerings like vertical search technology.

However, Hakia is also looking to other businesses for its revenue right now; earlier this year, it began licensing itself for enterprise search applications. And today, it’s announcing a new push to syndicate its engine onto other web sites, along with some bells and whistles like XML feeds. It’s offering up to 30,000 searches per day through a web site for free, before it begins charging.

It should be interesting to see how these two companies progress compared to each other, since they appeared at nearly the same time, with a similar pitch, but have since taken on very different strategies.

TextDigger’s $3.8 million round was led by True Ventures, with participation from the Exis Trust and CNET, which provided the San Jose, Calif. company’s $1.5 million seed round, and also uses the technology on its own website.

TextDigger is the latest company seeking that Holy Grail: Improving on Google’s results by understanding the sense of the words you’re looking for.

TextDigger’s search engine is called Digger, and it just launched at the DEMO conference.

First, some context: Digger, of San Jose, joins Powerset, the San Francisco start-up, and Hakia, of New York, and others which are trying to do something similar. Our piece on Powerset sparked debate within the search industry, namely because some experts believe automated search engines can never understand words the same way we humans do. Google, many think, is doing about as good a job as is possible. Google doesn’t try to assign meaning to your search term. It merely ranks the pages it thinks are the most popular that contain those words. Powerset still hasn’t launched. Hakia has, sort of, which we’ll get to in a minute.

TextDigger addresses the semantics problem by asking users to help it. If you search for “hotel with a view of the golden gate bridge,” it will tell you what it assumes about your intended meaning, and then asks you to modify. “View,” it tells you, means panoramic view, as opposed to personal belief. That might be fine, but what if you want personal belief?

By clicking on “refine keywords,” you can tell it you want “view” to mean personal belief (see screenshot below), or both panoramic view and personal belief. In other words, it is a classic Web 2.0 company, getting the masses to work on its behalf, and in turn improve results for everyone. This is significant, because Digger launches ahead of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’ effort to do something similar. Digger relies on what people tell it about semantics. Powerset, by contrast, relies on smart grammar interpretation, which is very different.

Whether Textdigger can pull this off is another question.

It is in a closed testing period. You need an invite. Chief executive Tim Musgrove says it gets better the more people use it. It’s not ready for the masses.

We played with Digger. Our conclusion: We think this is useful tool, and we’d be surprised if Google didn’t implement something like this soon — especially if Digger gets any traction. It should be easy to do.

We should note, with Digger, you can choose to refine the word meaning for only yourself, or for the community at large. And there are shortcomings. Digger dissects meanings of individual words only, so it can’t assess the meaning of two or three words together, like Powerset is trying to do. The other shortcoming is that depends on you logging on at the site, to personalize results for you. It will have a hard time opening up to non-registered access.

TextDigger has received $1.5 million, led by CNET, where Musgrove was a researcher.

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Meanwhile, Hakia has quietly launched.

Check out what it is doing with searches for people, like for Madonna. It categorizes results into news, music profile, biography and more, rejecting the repetitive results that you get at Google. Similarly, look results for chocolate, India, The Beatles or Red Sox. It’s too early to tell what exactly Hakia is doing, as we’ve yet to talk with them. But it’s essentially a hybrid of Google and Wikipedia — a more aggressive push toward the categorization strategy that Ask has been heading toward (see the right hand side of this search for chocolate, for example).