Reverb, which officially launched today, draws on the semantic knowledge of its parent site, Wordnik, an online dictionary that assigns meaning to words based on both standard definitions and real-life context. Reverb believes Wordnik’s technology will allow it to do a better job finding relevant stories than other content suggestion engines.

“We want to go beyond the lowest common denominator of celebrity posts,” said CEO Tony Tam in a phone interview, and claimed that Reverb’s ability to surface relevant content means publishers will get more life from their old stories. Tam says more than 1,500 publishers and blogs are so far using the technology, including sites like Laughing Squid and Dressaday.com

For now, Reverb’s service is free to publishers. The no-charge model appears to be an attempt to get a foothold in the market for story suggestion engines. Right now, that market is dominated by Outbrain, a New York company that helps publishers surface their own stories but also place links to content from around the web. If a reader clicks on one of the outside stories or ads, the publisher gets a commission that it shares with Outbrain. Meanwhile, commenting service Disqus has also launched an ambitious plan to make money from proposing suggested stories and ads in the reader comment section of websites.

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Wordnik provides a real-time engine for understanding the meaning of words that you read among various publisher sites. The best example of this might be a recent integration with SmartMoney, which provides relational links to a glossary that the publisher has assembled.

But managing dynamic, real-time understanding and meaning of words is no small task. To handle the task, Wordnik has gone through various iterations of its product in order to get to the speed and capacity that it needed. Wordnik started out on with a MySQL database on Amazon EC2, but found that setup wasn’t processing its data quickly enough. So it moved to some dedicated hardware and MongoDB, which solved its processing problem — it went from processing about 50 records a second to processing 1,000 records a second with the change, Tam said.

That was great from a performance point-of-view, but it came at a huge cost. In order to run at scale and to be ready for peaks in usage, Wordnik had a whole lot of excess capacity that was running idle most of the time.

“I’m not going to tell you that EC2 is as fast as raw metal, because it’s not,” Tam said. But what it lost in pure performance it was able to make up in part by using management tools to quickly bring up and shut down EC2 instances as needed and splitting processes across a number of clusters. Doing so cut costs by about half, when compared to owning servers with a bunch of capacity that was going unused most of the time.

To help with that, Wordnik relies on 10gen, which develops MongoDB and provides service and support to clients around it. 10gen founder Dwight Merriman said that the idea behind the database was in part to enable a cloud-based instances. But while MongoDB is cloud-friendly, Merriman said a number of clients still run it on dedicated hardware as well.

“Databases are not cloud-friendly. They’re one of the hardest parts of stack to get into the cloud,” Merriman said. “We’re big believers that this tech needs to be able to run anywhere… We don’t want it to be constrained.”

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