Just The Facts: Factery Labs Trims The Web Down To The Important Bits

When you go to search the web, is it because you want to read through a lengthy article related to a subject, or do you just want the facts that answer your question? Factery Labs, a new service that’s launching this morning, is hoping it’s the latter. Factery is a new search engine/API that uses advanced language processing to sift through content on the web to identify the most factual statements — in other words, it takes news articles and webpages and breaks them down into a handful of bulletpoints on the fly.
To give an idea of how Factery works, the company put together a simple search engine with a two-column view: one does a search for your query on Twitter and parses facts from any articles linked from those matches; the other column uses Yahoo’s BOSS engine to look at articles that are less time sensitive. In this context, Factery has its hits and misses. The site stumbled on “Danville, CA” (a city in the East Bay), yielding very few results for both Twitter and BOSS. Other times it fared very well: for “Arc de Triomphe” it generated quite a few interesting facts (you can see a few in the screenshot) though it sometime seemed to grab all of its Facts from either Wikipedia or Answers.com — it seems like it would have just been easier to read the Wikipedia article itself.
As for the Twitter integration, I found the results to be pretty poor for queries that weren’t about breaking news. The Arc de Triomphe example worked well for the Yahoo results, but the ‘facts’ from Twitter were useless, with non-sensical results like “The image is about 8×10″. But for queries related to breaking news it worked well. A search for “Leonid” (as