Paul Allen's Evri whips up a semantic widget

Evri, a Seattle-based semantic-Web project backed by Paul Allen's Vulcan Capital, has thrown open the doors on its beta site and on Evri's Garden, a sandbox for researchers and interested bystanders.

Formerly known as Hypertext Solutions, Evri's first widget offering in the Garden is a pop-up that examines the words it finds significant (generally nouns) on a page and returns various related articles, images, and video, and (if sufficient connections are available) a circle-and spoke chart, showing terms with which a given word has a close connection. An automatically generated chart might link, for example, "Barack Obama" with "Joe Biden," or "Beverly Hills" with "Ed McMahon," or "Mariners" with "failure." (I may have made that last one up. You can check for yourself on Evri's site or download the widget for your own uses.)

Like Google News, the search process is entirely algorithm-driven, drawing its links from a variety of "highly regarded information services," very nearly in real time. By parsing the semantics of the information it finds, Evri aims to provide better context than a search engine might -- guiding you to, for instance, articles on Madonna the singer rather than Madonna the religious figure. (One of those Madonnas is, by the way, Evri-linked directly to Bill Clinton. Guess.)

An early version of the search widget originally saw daylight at last May's All Things D conference. During his demonstration there, CEO Neil Roseman, formerly VP of technology at Amazon, described the widget's MO as "search less, understand more."

I question whether Evri entirely understands my most profound search needs; a check for the television show Pushing Daisies passed back on-point images, news, connections and a Wikipedia-based show synopsis, but the duplicate photos of the show-inspired crochet afghan may have been a bit random. Still, it works, and could add a little semantic sparkle to many a dull Web page.