NEW SEARCH ENGINE FROM THE FT HAS GOOGLE IN SIGHTS

A new business news search engine just launched by the Financial Times is claiming to deliver better results than Google, possibly threatening the future of traditional search engine optimisation (SEO).

The FT Group believes its semantic search engine is able to cut out "commercial clutter" that it says tends to skew results in Google and other search engines.

The new search engine called Newssift is supposed to deliver more relevant searches by context and meaning rather than relying on keywords being typed into a search box.

Newssift has access to millions of stories by tapping thousands of news sources across the world. Search results can be segmented by business topic, individual, place, organisation, news source, sentiment or theme.

FT Search chief executive Robin Johnson said, "The object was to create a tool to allow a busy business person to assess what is the skinny on a problem they do not know the answer to.

"There are only a few search engines that employ relationship-based or semantic algorithms and to date there is no other that accomplishes refinement using a business point of view."

The new search tool will be free to use, deriving income from advertising - although heavier users may be charged in future. Other revenue might come from syndication and data sales to companies concerning search usage related to them.

Some commentators speculate that the semantic and natural language approach could lead to search engine optimisation (SEO) - for banks, retailers, insurance companies, financial services, law firms, accountants and other businesses - evolving past keyword search and subsequently challenging Google's dominance of the search engine market in future.