No no, not Yahoo. Last week a new search engine, Yebol, was announced. Yebol denotes itself as a semantic search engine and describes itself like this: “Yebol utilizes a combination of patented algorithms paired with human knowledge to build a revolutionary Web directory for each unique query and each user.” It also mentions clustering. It’s available in beta at http://yebol.com/.

From the front page you can do Web search, news, video, etc. I did a search for Hawaii. As you can see from the screenshot, I got a search results page that was just crammed with information.

You’ve got related topics. You’ve got top sites. You’ve got categories. You’ve got news. You’ve got links to videos, images, and even way down on the bottom right (and you can’t see it in this screen shot) you’ve got Twitter updates. And somewhere in there, buried around the middle, you’ve got actual Web search results. Note this is a “semantics” search result and defaults to pretty much showing you everything, which I found overwhelming. The Web search results are much easier to use (more about those in a minute.)

I don’t care for the search results very much on this results page; they don’t provide information. You get a set of links from inside the page, and a set of keywords. That’s it. No snippets, no page size, no cache date, not even a page thumbnail. Not enough data. On the other hand, I rather liked the related topics on the left. It took the search for Hawaii and went wide-ranging, going from the Hawaiian islands to culture to language to the USS Arizona Memorial.

Right next to the Semantics search results, you can also get Web search results. I liked these a lot better. There was slightly more information included with the Web results, there are still Twitter and related topics results, and the search pages aren’t as crowded. The News, Images, and Video search results are pretty good too.

For me Yebol was less about the search results and more about the semantic and related information. Here’s what I’d do: take the Web results off the Semantic results page. You can leave a count there or something if you like, but the search results are to me secondary to the fact that you can get related topics and brief overviews of other topics around the Web. Explore the related topics further.

Promote the fact that there’s apparently an auto-generated Yebol Sematics page that can be created by going to yebol.com/keyword.html . For example, http://yebol.com/wind+surfing.html takes you to a Yebol Semantics search result page for wind surfing. These must be autogenerated, because I got really silly with http://yebol.com/peanut+butter+and+marshmallows.html and it STILL worked — I still got a Semantics search result page. (I didn’t get any related search topics, though I *did* get Twitter results.) Pulling Yebol pages this way would be a very fast method for building a search vocabulary using the related topics results.

I found Yebol interesting, but not, I suspect, for the reasons I was supposed to find it interesting. Take a look, and check out that automatically generated semantic results page.