There is so much chatter on the Web about companies that it is difficult to filter it down to the essential data that you need. Today, Alacra, a company that aggregates business information from proprietary databases for business customers, launched a new information filter on the Web. It is called Alacra Pulse. Alacra is applying some of the same semantic filtering technologies it developed for its corporate product to 2,500 public feeds on the open Web. These range from news organizations and research firms to hand-selected blogs.

You can search by company, analyst, or firm (i.e. the research source), and Alacra Pulse generates a feed of the latest news about that company. It compares the company names or tickers to its database of 500,000 public and private companies to categorize each article, and it throws some event-detection algorithms to surface only the latest news. The page for Google pulls up articles from Search Engine Land, TechCrunch, Silicon Alley Insider, Gartner, and Thomson. You can also search by “analyst.” For instance, here is a list of articles that mention Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster and what he’s is saying about Apple.

Alacra Pulse is probably more useful for investors, as it does a better job tracking public companies than private ones. The basic service is free, but the company hopes to upsell a premium version with more features to investment banks and other corporate customers. The free version, though, looks like a good resource for the rest of us when we need to do research on a stock or company.