NEWS: Evri building a data graph of the Web

Evri building a data graph of the Web

Posted by Dan Farber

Evri has a new twist on content navigation and discovery. Debuting Wednesday at D6, Evri is not a search engine, according to CEO Neil Roseman, but a "data graph of the Web" that leads to "incremental content engagement."

"What doesn't work well is when you get to other places on the Web," Roseman told me. "We read sentences, extracting the subject, objects and verbs, and map to other content on the Web." Evri uses entity extraction, natural language processing, statistical analysis, and other technologies to create relevant connections based on meaning and concepts without human intervention.

Evri creates profile pages, which are like search results, that include a variety of lenses for an entity, such as top connections (entities most closely associated with the target entity), people, location, products, organizations, and events.

Evri profile pages show five top connections as a starting point for drilling down into the related content and concepts.

The profile pages are somewhat like what you get from Mahalo, which is human-powered, but closer to Powerset, Hakia, Twine, and and other new services that leverage semantic and natural language processing technologies to map concepts and meaning rather than keywords.

Evri also is planning to offer content publishers widgets that produce related content for a particular page, similar to what Sphere (recently acquired by AOL), Inform, and Aggregate Knowledge provide.

Roseman is focusing Evri as a consumer product. He spent 10 years at Amazon working on several projects, including searching inside books, the MP3 store, and the server side of the Kindle reader. Currently, Evri has parsed less than 1 percent of the Web, working with 20,000 to 30,000 top-level domains and some full-text providers. "Once we distribute the widget to content providers, we will incrementally add more to our deep parsing, and figure out what drives the most page views on a daily basis and build the network over time," Roseman said.

Evri is expected to go into beta testing in a month, Roseman said. Some of the processing will be done via Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud facility. He noted that scaling to cover more of the Web is very hard. Evri will be ad-supported and will not charge content partners. "We will give partners all the revenue," Roseman said. "We want to build the network and get people to use Evri."

Seattle-based Evri has 36 people, mostly engineers, and is wholly funded by Vulcan Capital. So far Vulcan has poured about $8 million into the company, including the acquisition of some technology and engineering talent from Insightful, Roseman said. The company plans to go for Series A funding round this year.