We recently had the pleasure of a wonderful lunch at one of North Shore Long Island's four-star restaurants, the landmark Cypriot dining destination Ayhan's Shish-Kebab, in the company of the main spinners of a new search engine that chases streaming media in a new way.

The company is called Taalee, brainchild of Indian semantic savant Amit Sheth, PhD and Pinnacle founder Ajay Chopra. It does something that other search engines do not do, which is infer meaning when you do a search, rather than simply find a given metadata keyword or image. In a way, it's designed to read your mind. And, in the process, it both shrinks Internet data overload and then expands it in quite another way.

Hmmm...you may say. How's that possible? Are we talking search engine AI here?

Well, sort of. When you go to your average search engine, it looks for a tag. A word or a phrase usually, and it brings back everything it has on record that contains it. The results can be staggering and totally daunting. You go looking for Roger Clemens's batting average and you find 100,000+ references to Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), and surprisingly little about baseball. So you give up, swamped in irrelevant data you haven't time for. Or, you can refine your search to "Roger Clemens" (using quotation marks to restrict it to the full prase) and find reams of data about English marriages to a variety of Rogers in that clan, long before baseball was invented.

Finding by Association

But suppose you had a search engine that would look for a set of associations, not just a literal tag? Northern Light sort of does this, by spotting commonly associated words to the one you're looking for and sorting them in folders in a kind of flat file system. Taalee claims it's system can do that and go one step better by allowing uses to drill down in each folder a number of levels creating a complete hierarchical, or relational system.

Want connections to films or radio reports from baseball "stadiums" (it will know that's where the game's played) or about the Dominican Republic (which is where the balls are made)? Or bats (not the furry kind)? It will line you up on the core and ancillary issues of the subject matter, not just the word or phrase itself, thus focusing in on what you really want to know and not diluting it with irrelevancies.

This sounds like a relief, but it may take some getting used to. This is not the first time an attempt has been made to group specifics with their surrounding information environments. There was a time when the Encyclopedia Britannica read like a dictionary - a simple word search, and then a whole lot of data on the word. It took up two shelves, and you could thumb through it all day before you found what you wanted.