In the age of oversharing online, EverySignal Inc. is working to combat a growing nuisance: too much information.

Today the average person on Facebook has about 300 friends, which means a flood of daily updates. While some of it can be relevant, to a discerning reader, the rest is mindless palaver.

It’s a problem Facebook has tried to tackle by building a filter into its news feed that only selects what it determines are the most relevant updates. But EverySignal founder Derek Merrill said the filter is a blunt instrument that ends up cutting more than 80 percent of the posts in a social network. Some of the meaningful updates can be cast aside and might never get noticed unless people decide to seek it out themselves.

“While Facebook’s filter is improving, you’re still possibly missing major life events of people you know,” Merrill said. “We believe those life events are opportunities to make connections and strengthen personal relationships.”

EverySignal offered its take on the info overload problem with the web application it made public two weeks ago. Merrill’s company, with seven employees, is backed by Science Inc. and works out of the incubator’s Santa Monica offices.

EverySignal’s free service is part search engine and part email alert. Anyone can access the web application by going to the company’s site and logging in using a Facebook account. That gives EverySignal access to all the posts in a person’s Facebook network, which the software treats like a data set, using language analysis to categorize the subject of each post. For example, the software can pick out posts that mention baby showers, pregnancy or delivery dates and earmark them as “life events” alerts.

Using the software, a person then selects what kind of alerts from their network they want. Those alerts are sent to their inbox.

Rather than having users trawl through a social media stream to find the relevant information, EverySignal is designed to let users choose what information they want highlighted. Merrill claims EverySignal’s emails are opened 70 percent of the time, which he said is a high rate.

Beyond the convenience and organization that EverySignal is working toward, the software touches on the next wave of online networking: a social media-driven search engine.

Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has publicly stated his belief that web searching that takes social networks into account is on the horizon. He claims Facebook already gets more than 1 billion queries a day from users trying to comb through friends’ posts for relevant information (an example search Zuckerberg mentioned is “What sushi restaurants have my friends gone to recently?”) Earlier this year, Google Inc. revamped its search results to incorporate information from its social network, Google Plus.

‘Fabric of Facebook’

Although Facebook is not designed to handle most queries, that might soon change.

“Social search will be woven into the fabric of Facebook, and I’d expect it in the coming year,” said Martin Pyykkonen, a media analyst at Denver research firm Wedge Partners Corp. “Getting access to that information is helpful to advertisers and Facebook’s bottom line.”

Pyykkonen added that creating an advanced search feature is an expensive project, but one that is likely to be developed within Facebook rather than Facebook acquiring a company that already has the technology.

Of course, the prospect of Facebook creating a social search would essentially duplicate EverySignal’s service.

Merrill acknowledged that the world’s largest social network will eventually offer similar search features, but he countered that his company’s scope is poised to be much larger. Already the service can include a user’s LinkedIn network into the alerts. Future iterations of EverySignal are slated to search Twitter.

The potential for professionals to access the data in social feeds could usher in a new level of targeted advertising. That would provide a revenue stream to EverySignal, which it does not have now. Merrill sees EverySignal eventually working as a freemium model, where professionals pay to access specific search features that relate to their business.

For example, a personal trainer could see which friends are talking about health and exercise and offer his services. It might sound like an aggressive model of self-promotion, but Merrill believes that it merely embraces the way we are beginning to use social media.

“People are starting to change where they find answers to questions, get help or recommendations,” he said. “We’re just providing another lens into the important conversations that you care about.”