From their website, it looks like Yoogli is aiming to compete with Intelliseek, BuzzMetrics, Umbria, etc.:
Right now someone is writing about your product or brand and making it available on the internet. Do you wonder what they are saying?
Yoogli Research automatically monitors and understands the ongoing online conversations about your company. Unlike the competition, Yoogli Research has deep understanding of content and can accurately answer complex questions. What's your brand's perception? How has it changed? Do people like your product? What do they like about it?
Join other Yoogli customers and find what you are looking for!
I wonder if, by 'the competition', they mean the search engine competition, or if they are referring to others in the reputation/monitoring space (in which case - I'd love to see how they've got us beat!)
Yoogli claims to be in the next generation search space:
...by producing deep understanding of users and meaning.
In other words, a combination of text understanding and user/intention modeling or personalization. One has to be cautious with such claims. The time is certainly right for such a search engine, but deep understanding should generally be read as deeper understanding (let's not forget where Ask came from). In other words, there is a tremendous amount of value that can be driven from content with just a little bit more annotation in the index (entities, relationships, etc.) - the same goes for giving the user more power in the interface as well as recording history of use.
Yoogli's website suggests that they are balancing their strategy with vertical search (online personal media for corporate rep/brand-product tracking, travel and music) - this is a very important part of containing the scope of application for deeper NLP technologies, as well as constraining the space of user interactions (one doesn't ask a music search engine for cheap tickets to Cancun, afterall).
The CTO, Dave Taylor, is a WhizBang!Labs alumnus with whom I've personally worked with (hi Dave!). Umbria sprang from Semantic Discovery, founded by Brad Perry, another WhizBang!Labs alumnus (hi Brad!). Intelliseek's ARC - well, we're just WhizBang!Labs through and through (hi Matt, Kamal, Natalie, Takashi, Robert).
Whenever a new search engine pops up, one wonders where they are getting their data from - has anyone seen a Yoogli crawler/spider out there? Interestingly, a search on Google for 'Yoogli' asks 'did you mean google' - neat that there name is somehow algorithmically close to 'google.'
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