Knover: Where Jane Austen meets Jon Bon Jovi

Who knew that there's a link between Socrates and John O'Hurley from Dancing with the Stars?

Knover, a recently launched search site, is an attempt to ferret out relationships between noted personalities, living or dead, and organizations or concepts. Type in a name, and it will likely turn up a picture of the person, a small biography, and a list of people connected with the individual.

The company has files on 16,000 personalities at the moment and hopes to expand it to 100,000 in a year or so. It's similar in a lot of ways to the Internet Movie Database or social networks but with different source material.

Co-founder John Collier started it as a way to see how the lives of different jazz musicians intersected. Collier is a fan of pianist Wynton Kelly and wanted to track Kelly's catalog of sessions and recordings

Sometimes, the relationships run the gamut from useful to insane, depending on the query. Socrates and O'Hurley comes out as follows. Socrates is first connected to Angelina Jolie. Why? She appeared in Alexander, and someone on the Web said that Anthony Hopkins' performance in that movie reminded them of the person who played Socrates in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Jolie is connected to Trump and Trump is associated with Hurley. (The connection between Socrates and 70s rock novelty Suzi Quatro is equally thin, but it does go through Plato and the Monkees.)

A search on "World Zionist Government" turns up Al Gore, Osama Bin Laden and Ahmed Chalabi while a search on Trilateral Commission churns up George Washington, J.P. Morgan, Augusto Pinochet and Jimmy Carter. Well, duh.

But for more confined searches, it can be somewhat handy. A search on Kelly, for instance, turns up his work with Wes Montgomery and Ella Fitzgerald. You also learn that Kelly, along with Red Garland and Tommy Flanagan, was an influence on Bobo Stenson. (On other notes, a search also revealed that Joe Stummer, deceased frontman for The Clash, idolized Woody Guthrie.)

The company expects to earn revenue from ads and a percentage of product sales.