MetaGlossary - Meaningful Results

I stumbled upon MetaGlossary today. The usual search interface did not evoke any special reaction from me, or in other words, I did not feel interested a lot. The only difference was this statement just above the search box

Find meaning, not just links.

This was the only thing that made me try it out, the world moving towards Semantic Web can help itself with semantic results. Some trials and I really got hooked on to it.

What Works

I tried uber, l33t, n00b, fpga, semantic web, dubya and even my name abhijit. Nothing could break it, simply great. Checkout search for apple. This was required in the growing space of search engines.

What Not

However, after some more attempts I realised that the meanings were also expressed as opinions by individuals. This is fine for a information junkie, but can mislead a newbie looking to start from scratch. I also managed to confuse it with confused terms like web 2.0. Also some of the partial search keywords did not work as expected, like scoble did not return any results, but Robert Scoble did. One of the search engines that returns the Wikipedia entry for Scoble rather than his blog. Also, I am not sure if there is any ranking in the play, since the search for gandhi resulted in the movie being reported before the Mahatma.

I believe the search engine did its job, but the results were not accurate all the times. But it did extract meanings and organize them by topics, and worked most of the times in spite of being in beta. I think that speaks well, as softwares always work most of the times!