RBuzz - 12:51 am on Apr 24, 2003 (gmt 0)

Heini, many years ago (okay, about 3.5) AppSem was called Oingo, and they had a directory called Oingo.com. It's not there anymore, and I don't think I can point you to the writeup I did about it since that's against board TOS. But I'll quote from it.

"Oingo is a little simpler in that you type in a search word, and Oingo returns several possible meanings for the one word. Type in turkey, for example. You will get several checkboxes allowing you to further clarify what kind of turkey you meant. You can chose turkey as in poultry, turkey as in dud, Turkey as in place (several places in fact) and more. If none of Oingo's attempts at context are relevant, you can choose to search again for just the plain text of the word with no additional relevance."

As you can see, AppSem can not only determine page content, but can place the page content into one of several meaningful categories despite keywords which might fit into one of several meanings. (And bear in mind I wrote the above in October 1999. I'm sure they've improved and expanded the technology since then.)

I can see where this would be useful in building an ad distribution network, but I'm also thinking of the problems AOL is having, the resources they might not have to put into DMOZ, and who I would want if I found myself suddenly wanting to build a usable Web directory from scratch....

RBuzz