Image by Mark Coggins via Flickr

Everyone who is anyone in tech or an afficianado with respect to Dancing With The Stars knows Steve Wozniak, the Segue-loving, polo-playing, ever-smiling computer genius co-founder of Apple. Apparently Steve still knows a good thing when he sees it: he has just accepted a position on the advisory board of the research engine DeepDyve.  DeepDyve is a semantic search engine that scours the elusive deep web. I touched on it in an earlier post on semantic search engines and I have used it several times with decent results.

The deep web is as vast as our own ocean depths and, like the depths, is not easily accessible. Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb estimates that 99.8% of the web consists of this elusive data.

I didn’t realize this, but DeepDyve’s search algorithm was developed by scientists that originally worked on the Human Genome Project. DeepDyve uses similar pattern matching and analysis across large amounts of data in a very unique and effective way.

Another unique quality: Perez notes that the more text you enter into the search box, the more relevant the results. This is contrary to the usual experience with search engines, where more text tends to skew results in unintended ways.

The biggest complaint about DeepDyve to date appears to be its user interface, which is less than compelling. Never fear, though, as Woz has been tasked with improving the DeepDyve user experience.

How cool is that?