Shooting at Bubbles

Other than the fact that Factery has raised $1.2 million in funding not much more is known about the Menlo Park based startup. The company was founded in April, 2009, by Paul Pedersen and Sean Gaddis both of whom worked in search marketing at Google, Powerset, eBay and Skype.

The about page at the Factery.net site doesn’t hold much more information other than the company is dedicated to commercializing a product or service called FactRank technology that they say is meant to “enhance the discovery of relevant information in order to simplify and make useful the increasingly noisy social web experience”.

That’s the company blurb but I’ve also heard that the company is working on what is essentially authority algorithms. Tied in with this is there is also what AltSearchEngines refers to as a “sort of a hybrid of a semantic search engine”. Factery utilizes real time results from Twitter posts, images from Yahoo and content from other sources.

I was also told today that the company soon plans to expose a rich API of their data for developers to get their hands dirty in the hope I imagine that through the use of widgets and the such they’ll be able to gain some traction in a crowded field – regardless of whether they call it a “fact engine” or just another search engine.