MakTeck

Bessemer Venture Partners is launching an incubated startup called MashLogic into private beta today, with the audacious promise of helping people “take back the web.”

They say (and they’re not alone) that the web today is driven by page view economics and search engine optimization goals, which leads publishers to link to themselves too often. The result is a less than optimal web experience.

There are Greasemonkey scripts that strip out these inefficient links, and various services like Adaptive Blue are adding browsing and link options for users via a plugin. Another startup, Sphere, acquired by AOL earlier this year, is a pop up window triggered by users that shows other content they might be interested in based on an index of the current page. It worked, well enough to get them acquired at least.

MashLogic is a more direct approach. Users must download a Firefox plugin to use it, but there’s no toolbar. Instead, you simply change the settings to tell it what kind of information you’d like to have included on web pages. Links to Wikipedia is an easy one. But it also has company links to LinkedIn to show you people there you might know. And a currency converter. Etc. It’s like a frickin Swiss Army Knife for hyperlinks.