Comments on: An update on Powerset, the natural language search engine

By: VentureBeat » Powerset, the hyped search engine company, sees shakeup

VentureBeat » Powerset, the hyped search engine company, sees shakeup — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 17:06:05 +0000

[...] upbeat Pell — is doing quit a bit in its labs to create excitement about its product (see our coverage). It has opened a search box inside its labs, and offered several use cases such as Powermouse (see [...]

By: VentureBeat » Radar’s Twine: A semantic Google killer?

VentureBeat » Radar’s Twine: A semantic Google killer? — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 04:39:02 +0000

[...] is attempting to create just that. It should be noted that Powerset, of category #2 above, has partnered with Metaweb, thus placing Powerset in this third category as well in some [...]

By: Is Natural Language Search Better? « Fusing The Cube

Is Natural Language Search Better? « Fusing The Cube — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 23:40:50 +0000

[...] on July 11th, 2007. Recently I read an interesting VentureBeat article on a new natural language search engine called Powerset and I became immediately intrigued. I [...]

By: mkaz.com » Powerset, natural language search platform

mkaz.com » Powerset, natural language search platform — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 21:18:54 +0000

[...] at Powerset on Thursday, where they opened up what they are working and planning on. Powerset, if you hadn’t heard, is a new search start-up looking at becoming a relevant player in the search game. Their not-so [...]

By: Ogilvy Digital Watch

Ogilvy Digital Watch — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 11:56:42 +0000

[...] Powerset:根据一些业界人士对其解释:Web3.0将会是语义化网络，也就是从自然语句中找出需要查找的内容，而不是一些关键词和语句。在这方面做的比较好的是旧金山的Powerset。Matt Marshall对此有详细的阐述。据称，Powerset有打败业界老大Google的雄心。 [...]

By: Ogilvy China Digital Watch

Ogilvy China Digital Watch — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 09:07:12 +0000

[...] gotten the most attention in this area is San Francisco-based Powerset. Matt Marshall from Venturebeat has an update on the little company that wants to take on the mighty Google. Full disclosure: Powerset founders [...]

By: Click4Fansites » Blog Archive » An update on Powerset, the natural language search engine

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 06:49:27 +0000

[...] search engine company here in San Francisco that has convinced itself it can take on Google. via VentureBeat [...]

By: Natural Language Search & Powerset « correlate

Natural Language Search & Powerset « correlate — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 02:35:40 +0000

[...] white box”. Will they shift to typing in “Who won an academy award in 2001?” like discussed in VentureBeat earlier today. Time will tell but right now most would type “academy award [...]

By: newyorker

newyorker — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 20:48:53 +0000

So Halle Berry is the only person that won an academy award in 2001? I didn’t think so. They can’t even make a compelling demo, how will they build a useful service?

By: Clifford Parker

Clifford Parker — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 18:45:47 +0000

These search results just don’t seem like a very big deal to me. I tried “who won an academy award in 2001″ on Google and the 2nd link had a list of the winners. I tried “who proved Fermat’s last theorem” and the 4th link on Google mentioned Andrew Wiles in the snippet. The first link (to the Wikipedia entry on FLT) mentioned Wiles in the first paragraph. The query “what did steve jobs say about the ipod” does return better results in that Powerset screen shot, but overall I’m finding these Powerset examples to be far from compelling.

By: dumbfounder

dumbfounder — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 15:07:28 +0000

Ruby on Rails will just be their front-end web technology, all the backend has to be written in either C++ or Java. But glad to see another significant site go with RoR because there are definitely some performance issues that need to be worked out (Searchles runs on Rails as well, but has a Java backend), and hopefully this will help drive the efforts to fix those problems.

About the Powerset technology, it really seems like less of a search engine in the strict sense, and more of a content mining machine. Google and others link to answers, they don’t try to provide them. What incentives do content creators have in letting Powerset mine their data to provide the answers to these questions? If a user can get their answer without visiting a new site, they will.