Two cool search start-ups: Wowd and Yebol

First, Wowd. When Steve Jurvetson pitched "federated search" at the Churchill Club Top Tech Trends event I covered in May, he was actually shilling for this outfit, which is one of his investments. Wowd is a search engine without a data center. It puts the heavy lifting on the computers of the engine's users. With Wowd, you are the data center.

Yebol being built using new neural network technology. Founder and CEO Honfeng Yin says his algorithms are related to the "associative memory model," and that his goal is to convert information to knowledge (I've heard that before). Compared to Powerset's semantic search, which Microsoft bought, Yin says that Yebol's technology is far more scalable, and that his index already has one billion pages in it. The service is currently running an Amazon's on-demand cloud services. [Read more...]