DEMO: Semantifi crawls the deep, dark recesses of the Web for answers

Semantifi is one of 70 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2010 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Google and other popular search engines only search about 1 percent of the Web, according to research data from UC Berkeley. That just isn’t enough for deep-Web crawler Semantifi, which launched its new search engine at DEMO Fall 2010.

Semantifi offers users a way to search for specific data through a search engine powered by user-created apps. One example: searching for U.S. population numbers separated into age and gender. It uses the “deep Web,” where information is stored in databases and is not immediately accessible through traditional search engines that just search the text and images of websites. The technology to power Semantifi has been in development for 5 years.

Wolfram Research’s Wolfram Alpha, as well as some other data-powered search engines, also provide “answers” for searches on the Internet, such as a mathematical problem or what the national bird of Sweden is, but Semantifi offers users a chance to power the search with their own sets of data.

The Stamford, Conn.-based company is currently run by a team of 30, and has raised $3.5 million in one fundraising round in September 2008 from Connecticut Innovations and Launch Capital, as well as some individual investors.