Gestalt Internet search, connecting the silos

The Internet contains an increasingly vast amount of information from many sources created from many different perspectives. The freedom with which anyone can add content to the Internet gives rise to incredible richness covering many aspects of every topic. This same freedom, necessarily largely disorganized, also makes accessing the information and understanding which sources are objective or related and providing different views extremely difficult. There are many silos of information content generation, management, and aggregation.

Silobreaker is a combination of search and aggregation that attempts to make sense of the cacophony of discourse by automatically trawling the Internet and combining related information into a newspaper style that provides a single place where different aspects of news such as people, comment, geography, are collected together to provide a more rounded view of each topic.

The site is created automatically by robots that continuously search the web looking for related content and combining them into articles that can be searched. As well as using traditional search techniques it uses emerging semantic web technology to attempt to identify content that is related even though it was originally created in separate silos. The aim, to provide a way of accessing the increasingly complex heaps of independent blog posts, news articles, research papers...

The site also provides a semantic search that will find topics related to the one you are interested in. This example shows topics automatically discovered as related to Sustainability:

This is one of a number of attempts at making the process of sharing knowledge in a way it can be easily accessed more sustainable, reducing the risk of an increasingly disconnected set of different perspectives on the same topic and building a more complete picture of what we know, think, or claim.