Welcome to ESTER

ESTER is a semantic search engine, and this instance here is searching the English Wikipedia (Nov' 07 dump). Semantic means that you can type, for example, the query politician and you will find not only documents matching the word politician, but also documents containing instances of policiticans, e.g., George Bush, Angela Merkel.

ESTER lets you combine semantic and full-text search in the most natural straightforward way. Just type your query words, and ESTER will figure out which words relate to semantic classes and which to keywords. For example, the query double-helix scientist will find documents that mention a scientist (or contain the word scientist) and contain the word double-helix (there is no class with this name of which there could be instances).

ESTER tells you which semantic categories it knows. Just type a few letters of a word, and ESTER will tell you (in a special box below the search field) whether there are semantic classes starting with these letters. If you see the one which you actually intended, just click on it. For example, try the query veg.

ESTER shows both documents and entities. Below the search box you see the entities matching you query: continuations of the word you have typed last, instances of the class if it is non-ambiguous, or a list of classes otherwise. On the right side you see whichever documents match your current query (or rather: what ESTER made of tour current query).

Example queries

audience pope politician find politicians which had an audience with the pope.

german socc finds german soccer players. (There is only one semantic categorie starting with socc, hence the prefix suffices.)