Microsoft could learn a thing or two from the people behind Semanti. Launched yesterday, this search engine add-in offers something that, quite honestly, puts Bing’s attempts at superseding Google to shame.

And Semanti isn’t even a standalone search engine - it’s a search engine add-in available as a plugin for FireFox. Which, as you can imagine, makes things even more embarrassing for executives at the Big M.

How Semanti works is rather simple, really. Simple, yet ingenious. Like a sieve, or a whisk. Except it can’t be used to make tasty cake.

Semanti empowers the search functionality in Google, Yahoo or Bing by providing a list of semantic options when you enter a search term. For example, when searching for a battle axe it provides a dropdown with the following options:

Which should come in handy for any medieval warrior in a hurry.

Seriously though, it’s easy to see how useful functionality like this could prove to be. But that’s just the tip of a rather large iceberg.

If you find a page you like, you can easily bookmark it with a simple click of the Semanti ‘S’ logo in your browser toolbar. And bookmarking in Semanti offers some key advantages over regular browser bookmarking.

One of which is the option to label your search results. Once you’ve done this, your bookmarked page will turn up when you conduct searches for the terms you used to label it. For example, say I did a search for ‘Mr-T’ and tagged his Wikipedia page (Mr-T OWNS Wikipedia) with the term ‘jibber jabber’. Having done this, any future searches for ‘jibber jabber’ would serve up Mr-T’s page in the results. And by doing this, you’ll be helping out other users too – other than adding new terms and phrases themselves, the guys at Semanti plan to use tags submitted by users to further improve search results.

Another advantage that Semanti bookmarking offers is the ease with which it allows you to retrieve your favourite pages. You can simply do a quick search, rather than sifting through hundreds of bookmarks. And by saving your bookmarks on Semanti’s server, you don’t even have to be at your personal computer to access them.

But, as cool as all of this is, what many will find most exciting about Semanti is its integration with Facebook. Using Facebook Connect, Semanti allows Facebook friends to share recommendations with one another. So, if one of your friends finds a page they particularly like, they can share it and next time you search for a similar term it’ll be recommended to you. Which is great – provided you don’t hang around with a bunch of cretins like I do.