FT Search -- a startup wholly funded by Finacial Times parent-company Pearson --  today launched a business news search engine called Newssift. Carrying the FT's branding, Newssift is free and ad-supported now, but the company plans to charge premium subscriptions later.

On the phone with a Newssift rep, we started to call the search engine a Google News rival, but she corrected us, saying its less consumer-oriented than that.

One term this rep and CMO John Greenleaf used a lot when talking about Newssift was "semantic search." The idea is that this search engine understands connotation and inference; it can understand that a search for "Asia" doesn't have to yield only stories with "Asia" in the body text.

Here's a demonstration video:

Newssift Quick Start from Amy Grabowski on Vimeo.