Ness Being More Subjective on Search

Ness is working on developing highly personalized search engine and recently received 5M from investors.  Vinod Khosla  of Khosla Ventures lead the Series A round, with participation from Alsop Louie Partners, TomorrowVentures, Bullpen Capital, and Angel investors.

The Alsop-incubated company is sometimes described as the “Palantir for fun,” Ness CEO and co-founder Corey Reese says.

If you use search products today there’s plenty of things for solving objective inquiries. But what about things that are more subjective?,” Reese says. “What about, ‘what’s best for me?’. Is there a concert this weekend that I should go to?,” he continues. What Ness is building will attempt to answer these inquires.

Ness has involved building what is essentially a recommendation engine that uses machine learning when looking at social data from Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, and other places. The other part is the actual search engine to serve up useful results based on these signals.

Reese calls this combination their “Likeness Engine”. This name comes from both your “liking” of things online, and your digital “likeness”. In fact, this is where the “Ness” in their name also comes from. With the Likeness Engine in mind, Ness secured the likeness.com domain, where you can sign up for early for invitation for application.  Ness is planning to release mobile application.

“Google did a great job organizing the world’s data, but we’re about organizing opportunities,” Reese says. He notes that they’re in a much better position to do this than someone like Google because there are so many different social signals out there, and politics prevents Google from access all of them (like some Facebook data, for example). Because they’re independent, when a new service, like Google+ emerges, Ness can quickly add that data to their mix, Reese notes.