Primal is adding a few things to its semantic search tools today at the Semantic Tech Conference, including the launch of Primal Pages and the availability of its public API. The two new features are major announcements for Primal, as the company looks to grow its service-based offerings.

Created as an infrastructure solution, Primal has been rolling out a handful of consumer-facing products over the past year or so. Today’s announcements reflect this double-stance approach Primal is taking with its growth strategy towards building its “thought network.”

Primal Pages

With a semantic search engine already open to the public, the new Primal Pages addition brings more personalized features to the act of web search. The goal of Primal Pages is to make content more searchable for content publishers, as well as more accessible to consumers. Primal aims to do this through Pages by creating a web-based repository for individuals’ search activity. Consider it a temporary (or permanent) bookmarking page that contains the items you’ve found important during your search. These Pages can be saved and shared.

Primal Pages enhance the company’s existing search tools because Primal already had a very circular and action-oriented format to its site. Anything you search can be expanded upon, and anything you expand upon can be searched. No matter what you do, save or look up, you can repurpose that information in a custom manner. This is designed to help you work through ideas and solve problems, instead of wasting time digging through a sea of search results.

The way in which Primal does this is pretty hands-off for content publishers–they don’t have to do anything in order to re-categorize their site data for custom consumer search. Of course, users have the benefit of personalized search without having to do much work either.

There’s also competition coming from all sides, as major and small search engines alike look to the real time web and new developments in social search to strive towards similar solutions. Founder and Co-President Peter Sweeney notes the difference between Primal and, say, Google’s Wonder Wheel, saying

If the document you need already exists, search engines are the perfect tool. However, for most tasks, the document you need has not been written. It’s still waiting to be composed as an expression of your unique thoughts and ideas. It’s this type of creative, personal activity that we want to support with thought networking. And when you consider how much of our thinking is presently cooped up in our heads, and how painful it is to express your thoughts and work with them online, it gives some sense of the vast room for growth.

Primal Public API

And growth is key for Primal at this stage. The company’s API release is a necessary step towards Primal achieving its long-term goals, particularly as its focus is on infrastructure search solutions. Promoting and cultivating its API offerings will attract developers looking to build on real time and social search trends, especially as they have a certain appeal towards individualized results and recommendations. From Sweeney:

We expect that the real killer apps for thought networking will emerge through third-party developers. By providing programmatic access to our underlying semantic synthesis technology, we’re hoping to spark the exploration of many different user interactions and application concepts. And within existing product categories like search, content management, and social media, semantic synthesis can address a number of pain points in data architecture. For those developers that are looking to personalize their applications and avoid painful data modeling tasks, I think they’ll find our technology a compelling addition to their solutions.

Consumer activity within social media has helped to drive demand for better search query organization, revitalizing infrastructure interest in the semantic web. Earlier this week, Inform Technologies announced a $4 million Series A round of funding, with major publishing platform Huffington Post taking a direct interest in incorporating semantic web technologies towards higher consumer engagement.