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During a compelling presentation of Fortune Interactive's SEMLogic demo, I realized a greater implication of the service than accurate search marketing - Mike Marshall and his team have managed to duplicate search engine functionality.

"No more secrets, Marty."
-- Ben Kingsley brags about his black box to Robert Redford in 1992's Sneakers

It's easy enough to mention the name of Andy Beal, marketing guru and co-founder of Fortune Interactive, when discussing his company and search marketing. During a pre ad:tech look at his company's SEMLogic demo made it very clear that Mike Marshall, co-founder and vice president of technology, deserves mention today.

Some readers may already know SEMLogic, which enables them to see in a three-dimensional representation their company's place in the SEMasphere. The SEMLogic environment replicates where a company resides in terms of its ranking for a given search engine.

Marshall noted the main idea of SEMLogic, where his firm's techs can look at various factors affecting ranking, and get an in-depth look at campaigns and sites in a matter of minutes.

The view they see shows a given site as a sphere in the SEMasphere environment, as seen through SEMLogic. A yellow sphere represents the gold standard of search results: a site's placement in the 1 through 10 rank. Blue spheres signify 11-20. Red, well, red means something below 21. Virtually invisible to searchers.

So instead of poring through reams of data and line after line on reports covering all manner of metrics, a SEM tech can look at a client's sphere, and click on it for an assortment of details.

That's where the work done by Marshall and his team really shines. Visually, a client sphere and its surrounding spheres shows where work needs to be done to improve ranking; yellow and white stripes on a red sphere, and their placement relative to each other, show just how much improvement a site or page needs.

SEMLogic's theme analysis index assesses the relevance of a site or a page to a query. Think about the implication: provided with a site's details, SEMLogic knows where the site will rank in a given search engine. Before it enters the search engine's index.

Marshall and the Fortune Interactive team will demo SEMLogic at ad:tech. It's worth a look. As far as Google and other search engines go, Marshall and Beal may just know their secrets. Or at least enough to nudge a site up in the rankings.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.