FactBites Search Engine Encyclopedia Hybrid
What do you get if you cross a search engine with an encyclopedia? Factbites. Under the slogan “where results make sense”, Factbites provides searchers with full sentences about their search topic, rather than the sentence fragments that most other search engines offer.
Rather than focusing on link-based technology like Google, Factbites looks into the tone and subject matter of the given topic. The engine reportedly “reads” the content of each page and determines how meaningful the text is. It seeks out authoritative and informative content, preferring encyclopedia-style fact-based descriptions to the chatty, spammy and inconsequential.
The end result is a clean summary you can almost read from beginning to end. Not only is this an effective filter against spam and clutter, it’s also a time saver, because it gives users a clear picture of what each destination site is about. In this beta release, 800,000 topics are covered.
“We devote a lot more processing power to every search. Factbites is never going to be the place to locate your lost aunt, or order items from your corner store”, says Luke Metcalfe of FactBites. “But for meaningful content about real topics, there’s nothing out there like us”. The FactBites site offers an interesting FactBites to Google comparison.