Evri (www.evri.com) started out as a tool rather like the “Sphere” widget that sites like CNN.com use to show related content on the same site and elsewhere on the Web. This technique is one way of finding pages on the same topic, such as the one you’re already reading, by using natural language techniques to understand what the page is about. Evri mines sites like Wikipedia, Amazon, and Freebaseto to build an extensive dictionary. It knows about 42 different things called “blue” and it knows that “ten” is a Pearl Jam album as well as a number. It uses rules like “people speak and cities don’t,” to avoid getting confused by phrases like “Chief Seattle spoke.” And it puts together the information it derives from Web pages and the connections it finds between them to build a page about each entity (a person, product, or thing) in the knowledge base. This combines search results with standardized information: everything from date of birth and family members to salary and nicknames (for people) to revenue and number of employees for companies.