Sensebot is a semantic search engine still in beta (we reviewed it last summer). The main boon of Sensebot is that it summarizes Google search results through text mining. But you don’t have to register for the beta to profit from the technology. Try installing the Sensebot Summary plug-in for Firefox.

The extension integrates with the Google results page.

You do your Google searches as usual, but at the bottom of the results page a new button is added: “Summary”. When you click it, a text summary of the results is generated and displayed on the same page.

Save time on informational queries

According to Dmitri Soubbotin of Sensebot, a text summary is most useful for informational queries, rather than navigational or transactional. Here’s a sample query for “Vladimir Nabokov” to give you an idea.

Through text mining of the results, Sensebot Summary creates a digest on the topic of the query. The idea is to save users time by giving them a quick answer, saving them the trouble of drilling into each individual result page.

The Firefox extension is limited to summarizing one page of search results. Unlike the extension, the SenseBot search engine can parse up to 10 pages and generate a summary.

“It is quite an eye-opener to see a valuable piece of information brought from the 4th or 5th page of results,” says Subbotin.

The mechanics of Sensebot

As for the mechanics of SenseBot, Subbotin explains that it performs text mining of every source and “understands” its key concepts. Then it performs a multi-document summarization of all sources together, attempting to present the content as coherently as possible.

The query is also taken into account, and extra weight is given to the concepts related to it. So there is really a lot of work going on in the background. In the full SenseBot version the key concepts are shown in a “Semantic Cloud” above the generated summary.

Get the Sensebot Summary plug-in for Firefox.