The Financial Times has officially launched Newssift, a semantic business news search engine, in beta.

Newssift's aim is to "put an angel on the shoulders of the business person," stated CEO Robin Johnson, who asserted the engine would add context and meaning to the business news search engine industry, dominated by the old-school keyword-based algorithm.

Queries can be refined across a panoply of search options: Topic, Organization, Place, Person, and Theme/Keyword. Results can also be managed by Sentiment and/or Article Sources. For example, a user can toggle between news stories that talk either favorably or unfavorably about Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, Search Engine Land quipped.

According to Johnson, Newssift is the first search engine to apply a relationship-based algorithm to business news. The objective is to beguile users with the ability to start with generic queries, then refine and refine until they've located the results most relevant to themselves.

The search engine currently indexes thousands of news sources worldwide — meaning millions of articles are simmering in its database — with no preference for Financial Times news.

Newssift is in public beta.