My colleague Herb Roitblat at Orcatec recently launched a vertical search engine called Truevert to demo Orcatec’s semantic search capabilities. From the about page:
This version of Truevert is focused on green, environmental awareness. All searches are done from the point of view of environmental and social concern. The results are obtained from YAHOO BOSS. They are then organized and clustered by Truevert. If you search for the word “carbon” for example, it knows that you want information about carbon’s impact on climate change, not its physical chemistry. What’s most surprising, is that the Truevert search engine learned all this in less than one hour on a single server with no ontology, taxonomy, or thesaurus.
Check it out! Not only is this an interesting applicaiton of Yahoo BOSS, but it also uses performs theme extraction to support limited query refinement. I’d like to see a truly exploratory interface, but I think this is a step in the right direction for vertical search.
The Noisy Channel 