PHOENIX – Despite powerful search engines, the vast and rising sea of information on the Internet often makes users feel like they’re stuck alone in a rowboat when it comes to fishing out exactly what they need.

Even after someone finds an answer, the next person with the same question must start all over again. Sometimes, information is locked away inside a photo or other media file that’s largely inaccessible to search engines that scour the Internet for text.

The problem with corralling results from today’s search engines was a major theme at this week’s DEMO tech conference, where nearly 70 companies were given six minutes each to show off their up-and-coming products.

“There’s a belief that whatever it is I’m looking for is out there, but I have a really difficult time finding it,” said Chris Shipley, executive producer of the elite show. “Search algorithms alone are falling short in being able to provide real context around information.”

Here are some offerings:

Plum: www.plum.com.

What it offers: Lets users group Web pages, e-mail, music, pictures and files from their desktop computers into online collections that can be kept private or made public for others to find.

How it works: Web pages can be added to a Plum collection by clicking on a browser toolbar button, which calls up a box for choosing a picture, adding a description and creating an identifying tag. Content on the PC, such as a photo, can be added by clicking in a small program that imports files from a variety of applications.

Public collections are analyzed by the service and others that might be of interest are displayed, said Plum co-founder Hans Peter Brondmo. Eventually, collection pages will contain relevant ads.

Special service: The secret sauce is an algorithm that analyzes and tries to match content – not unlike how a shopping site makes product recommendations based on previous purchases.

Designed to be totally open and easily editable, Plum collections can be e-mailed to other users and even syndicated as an online “RSS” feed. If you subscribe to someone else’s collection, you can immediately see when content is modified or added.

Status: Plum is undergoing private testing, and the company has not yet announced a date for public availability.

Kaboodle: www.kaboodle.com.

What it offers: Aims to make online searching a social activity – but with a focus on shopping.

“The trouble with online shopping today is there are too many choices,” said Manish Chandra, Kaboodle’s founder and CEO. “You have to visit multiple sites before you make any decision. It’s hard to get all that information in one place.”

How it works: By clicking a button on a Web browser’s toolbar, a user can add a page of interest to Kaboodle. On e-commerce sites, Kaboodle grabs the price, a picture and description of an item and stores it on the user’s Kaboodle page.

If the creator makes the pages publicly available, they can be found by others either through Kaboodle’s search box or other search engines. Users also can post notes and comments to their Kaboodle pages.

Status: It’s currently available as a free public test.

Riya: www.riya.com.

What it offers: Tries to tackle two headaches: the difficulty of sharing information and the fact that photos can’t be searched easily unless they’ve been properly tagged with text descriptions.

The free service relies on face and text recognition to look inside the photo. It keeps a copy on its servers, which the user and others can search by typing in a name of someone in a picture.

“There are a lot of online services for printing, sharing and organizing your photos but not one that automatically searches them,” said co-founder Manjul Shah.

How it works: After users upload their pictures, the system scans the images for faces. Those that aren’t identified – likely all of them at first – are displayed. The user can then manually identify a person by clicking a box that appears around the mug and entering the name.

It also can scour a user’s address books for contacts who have used Riya to identify faces. If any are found, their previous work in training the system to recognize faces is automatically inherited by the new user.

Status: Expected to open for public testing this month.