Evri Semantic Search Misses Evri-thing for Me

I was excited to try out Evri, the new "semantic" search engine on the block. Usually our author Cyndy gets more excited about semantic web applications than I do. I'm ever hopeful of finding one that truly works and becoming sold on the whole idea of a semantic web, though.

Sadly, I must continue to hold out hope for true semantic web. Evri, while attractive in appearance and very pleasant to surf, is not the semantic web search answer I was hoping for. I enjoyed the graphics aspect for visual effect, and there are many positive things about the site overall, but it still falls a bit short of the mark.

Evri's tag line is "search less, understand more". I found myself having to work harder to search on Evri, and getting fewer and less relevant results. Their drill down by popularity method is quite agonizing to use.

Granted, it could be that I'm wishing for a better version of searching like I always search, in a very precise and controlled manner. It could also be that I'm just not suited for a semantic web. I often find that things like mind mapping don't work for me because my mind walks to the beat of its own different drummer, and that could apply to semantic search as well.

Perhaps the biggest issue I have with Evri is that I don't want to be forced to look for everything in a top down manner. I don't care what is popular on the web to random other people, I care about the information I seek being accurate, relevant to my needs, readily available and easy and fast to find.

Starting with Barack Obama and digging through pages other people think are relevant hoping to find an answer I seek, with no way to streamline the search or manually search, does absolutely nothing but frustrate me. Other options at the moment are to dig through popular locations and things, or to click out from a list of recent popularity changes. None of this is at all helpful.

Evri is a miss if you are looking for true semantic search. If you need good search results, I'd say stick with Our Bountiful And Most Generous Overlords at Google. Heck, even Yahoo's less than accurate search engine gives back results with more meaning than this. But if pretty graphs and presorted links are what you are looking for, you might enjoy spending some time on Evri and not mind the limitations and portioned, partitioned information.