Also a nice search engine is http://www.search2.net

the story was updated by PE Hub

http://www.pehub.com/49775/more-details-on-factery-funding/

Yesterday we spotted a regulatory filing from something called Factery.net, which had raised $1.25 million in VC funding. No investor info on the document, and the only listed executive was search marketing vet Paul Pedersen. We described it as an “online answer engine,” based on the alpha product up on Factery’s website.

Now a source has filled us in with additional details, including how Factery’s current website isn’t really representative of its product plans.

First, the financing: This is considered a seed round, with U.S. Venture Partners serving as lead investor. USVP partner Paul Matteucci took the board seat, even though Tim Connors was the original deal lead. Angel backers include Ron Conway, Frank Caufield Jr., Aydin Senkut and Maurice Werdegar.

Now, the company: Menlo Park-based Factery isn’t looking to become the next Google. It’s current website — which consists of little more than a search bar — is basically a development environment to help Factery build a real-time semantic extraction platform (called FactRank, as a play on pagerank), which it would then commercialize and (hopefully) provide to search outfits like Bing.

“It’s deep search in real time,” says our source. “It can go into the Twittersphere, go into and out of links and filter out the noise.”

Update: I’ve spoken to Pedersen, who confirms the above information. He adds that the seed funding should keep Factery afloat for the next 12 months (current staff is just four people), but that it would look at begin raising a larger round ($5m-$10m) at the end of Q1 2010 or early the following quarter. He didn’t discuss the seed round valuation, but did say he’d be hoping for a 4x or 5x step-up from the seed post-money to the next round’s pre-money.

“There are so many bit.ly and other links out there, but nothing telling you if the content people are looking at is of any use,” Pedersen explains. “We’re going to use our technology to go fetch that page, and in effect pre-read it or pre-process it for you. Tell you it’s a good page because it has high factual value. We’re almost serving an editorial function, in a sense.”