Australian Tech Firm Launches 3G Beta Search Engine

Australian start-up tech firm Lexxe announced on Thursday the launch of its third-generation Internet search engine which uses Semantic Key Search to yield specific target information based on application of natural language search technology.

Semantic keys are of two types, word and number combinations. An example is the word "colour" which needs more details such as specific colour hues like red, green or blue. Another example is the word "distance" as a number type of word because it combines words and numbers such as 60 km or 45 miles.

"If someone wants to find out what colours are associated with Toyota Camry cars, they invariably type 'colour Toyota Camry' into a search engine's query. Currently, search engines will at best, search and return documents with a combination of the words 'colour' and 'Toyota Camry' in the results, when in fact what the user really wants is to understand which colours are available, such as 'red', 'black', 'white' and so on," Lexxe Chief Executive Officer Dr Hong Liang Qiao said in a statement.

He explained that general information search will return Web pages based on the meaning of the key words and would not analyse the contents in a linguistic sense. Lexxe uses content knowledge database and linguistic algorithms to identify the real topics of every document, Mr Hong added.

He said Lexxe will return documents with contents relevant to the query. Mr Hong said popularity will only play a small part if it has relevance in the search.

Lexxe, funded by a Saudi Arabian investor, runs its search engine from computers based in California. The 3G search engine it launched is just a beta version, which iwire notes, still has some wrinkles.

iwire cited as an example typing in the words "tasty turkey Christmas" and the search did not yield any single turkey recipe but showed up links to Turkish tourism sites and lyrics of a novelty song authored by Dustin the Turkey.

Mr Hong said the final version of the search engine would likely be released in the next 12 months. He said Lexxe filed five patents to protect the system's intellectual property.