I read the NY Times piece that sat atop Techmeme for a while last week about New Search Technologies Mine the Web More Deeply and it reminded me of the chat I had with an old university pal last week about his company.

My pal is Mark Redgrave and he’s CEO of a company called Hapax who have a product called Find Engine and a platform called Amplify. They specialise in Fact Retrieval (rather than document retrieval). You can find out more about this in their whitepaper but this paragraph gives you a pretty good idea of what they’re all about

With FindEngine™, Hapax is changing the existing search engine paradigm by abandoning index terms and document topics as the signifiers of content, in favor of the facts themselves. FindEngine™ does not operate on topics that are assigned to documents, or on the occurrence of words in documents, but on what the text actually says about its topic. FindEngine™ does not search for documents, but facts. By making the facts searchable, the FindEngine can perform IR in the complete fashion that enables
information output to be directly used in decision making.

I’m thinking of asking Mark to index my blog and provide a search page for it to test this out and see if I can ask questions like “what does steve think of twitter” and stuff like that.

Back to the NY Times piece though and Steve Ballmer’s assertion that web search will move beyond 10 blue links and maybe this is one way to get there.

What I really want though is Mark to point his tech at Twitter. Now THAT would be very interesting.