Looking to develop an Interest Engine

I exchanged emails with the founder of a startup, and we touched on the topic of linking internet content to personal interests.  This is one of the last frontiers of searches and delivering content.  A hell of a lot of money could be made if someone made a content delivery system from the web that was say, 80-90 percent right all of the time.  I suppose that the Semantic Web with it Resource Description Framework and Web Ontology Language might help, but that is a bit of pie in the sky, because there are millions if not billions of html pages already out there that will never be reworked.

So the work will have to come from the server side.  The search engines will have to get a hell of a lot better at context recognition.  However, my specific concern is matching your interests to web content. For example, suppose you listed your interest as cats.  There is the cat breeder who is interested in breeds of cats.  There is the charity who rescues cats.  Veterinarians need information on cat diseases and pharmacology.  Just putting in the word cats will create a lot of junk to sift through for each specific case.  This example is trivial because you could add another search term like "rescue" or "veterinary" etc.  But what if my interest is "neat stuff".  How would I create a machine language to search and deliver neat stuff content.

My research continues, but if you have any ideas, leave a comment.  Thanks.