DigitalBeat

There’s a flood information in all the links posted by users on social sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Delicious. Now a startup called Factery wants to help you dig up the facts in those links with a new technology called FactRank (the name is a nod to Google’s PageRank technology).

Right now, the Factery site is pretty bare-bones, but co-founder Paul Pedersen says the company’s goal is a combination of fact extraction and real-time search. It will look at follow the different links posted at sites like the ones I just mentioned, then rank the pages based on the “quality and quantity of relevant factual information” found there. So when someone enters a search query, Factery would return relevant facts from the most fact-rich page it can find.

“In effect we’re automatically reading all the pages recommended via Twitter search, etc. and evaluating them for you,” Pedersen says. He adds that Factery wants to be transparent about how FactRank works, so that it can get feedback, rather than “putting a paper bag over the company.”

The company just raised a $1.2 million seed round from US Venture Partners and a group of angel investors including Ron Conway, Aydin Senkut, Maurice Werdeger, Frank Caufield Jr., and Pedersen. (Senkut has also invested in VentureBeat.) peHUB first reported the funding.

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Tags: co:Factery, inv:US-Venture-Partners, people:aydin-senkut, people:Frank Caufield Jr., people:Maurice Werdeger, people:Paul Pedersen, people:Ron-Conway