Lexxe pledges semantic search in 2012

Beverley Head
Wednesday, 02 November 2011 17:17

IT Industry - Development

Sydney based start-up Lexxe - which has been funded with $2 million Saudi Arabian investment money - is edging closer to releasing the final version of what it describes as its semantic search engine, four years after the early versions of the product first debuted. But the beta still seems to have some wrinkles.

With a background in linguistics, founder and chief executive officer Hong Liang Qiao, told iTWire that the latest system had been developed from the ground up to make sense of a search query instead of just find and point to the same text online. An earlier version of the tool, which was based on a question and answer metaphor, and which sat on top of Yahoo! was abandoned with Lexxe now using its own web index, own web crawler and search algorithms.

Although developed in Australia, the search engine is being run on computers based in California.

Dr Qiao said that the system used a 'semantic key' to make sense of a query. For example searching for 'fruit rich in vitamin c' would use a semantic key that had already been programmed into the search engine to link the word fruit to other words such as pineapple or lemon in order to come up with a more appropriate search result.

The Lexxe beta however, which was launched in September, still seems to have a few wrinkles. Type in a search for 'tasty turkey Christmas' and not a single recipe appears on the front page of the search, although there are links to Turkish tourism sites and details of a novelty song by someone/thing called Dustin the Turkey.

Dr Qiao said that the relatively slow development of the search engine - he was talking to the media about Lexxe back in 2007 - was partly due to the un-named Saudi investor, who owns 50 per cent of the company, only forwarding funds once certain milestones were met. He said however that he was confident that the final version of the search engine would be released in the next 12 months, and added that five patents had been filed to protect the system's intellectual property.