Omnity's search engine uses rare word matching to find unexpected results

When it comes to search, there's Google and there's everyone else -- the company is basically synonymous with searching the internet. But Omnity, a relatively new company from San Francisco, thinks own search that's based on "semantic mapping" offers something that Google can't do. Omnity's trick is that it looks for the connections between documents on the internet based on rare words -- the theory that research that has several of the same rare words will likely be about related topics, even if that research doesn't directly link to or cite each other. Thus far, Omnity has operated primarily by selling enterprise plans to companies and educational institutions. Omnity can search not only all of the public datasets it scans (like patents, scientific, engineering and medical documents, clinical trials, case law, SEC filings and so forth) but also a company's internal documents -- for some companies, Omnity indexes 150 petabytes of data.