"Understanding" Search Engine Enters Public Beta

religious freak sends word of the public beta of Powerset, a closely watched San Francisco startup that promises an "understanding engine" to revolutionize Web search. An article in SearchEngineLand points out that Powerset is reaching higher than for mere "natural language." Techcrunch has more details and analysis. For the beta, Powerset makes available all of Wikipedia to search — not all the Web. It's said that their understanding engine required a month to grok Wikipedia's 2.5M articles. The Web is currently at least 8,000 times as large.

Re:I'm Unimpressed

[bluefoxlucid]

Use site:en.wikipedia.org to have Google ask all of Wikipedia (English)

2 out of 10

[KNicolson]

I tried just "Osaka", where I am right now.

First match was an obscure album, then a few "factz" that made no sense.

Let's try again, "What is the largest city in Japan?"

Tokyo doesn't feature at all on the first page! It fairs just as badly with other countries.

It now seems to be slashdotted, so I better quit now.

Re:I'm Unimpressed

[gadzook33]

I agree. I tried something that would betray understanding, such as "Why did Germany attack Russia?". Same result, barely any mention of WWII. All top google results, however, were relevant.

Re:Jargon pisses me off...

[invader_vim]

"Grok" isn't jargon. It's a perfectly cromulent word. (Albeit one coined by Heinlein in 'Stranger In A Strange Land'.)

Re:I'm Unimpressed

[MadnessASAP]

It's because of Pagerank, both Wikipedia and IMDB are linked to from many thousands of sites and as such they have an insanely huge pagerank virtually guaranteeing there spot at the top of any listing. So although you may not agree with it they are at the top because many other people do use it as a reference.

Re:No, early Google was better than anything else.

[Kamokazi]

Amen....I remember researching something usually meant using several different search engines (Yahoo was more concise but lacking, Altavista had EVERYTHING but took a while to find the good results, etc), and if you wanted something useful, you better know how to use your +,-, and ""s.

Then Google comes around. You search for something and you find a good result (or three) on the first page, which was rare on Yahoo etc. unless you were looking for something really basic.

Re:I'm Unimpressed

[Threnody]

Thanks for testing us out with some real queries -- it's the best way to get the Powerset experience. But, if you only ask NL questions then you don't get to see all of Powerset's features.

Powerset is not token matching. In fact, we read every sentence from every page in Wikipedia that we index. For examples of how we understand syntax, check out queries like "who did texaco acquire" vs. "who acquired texaco". Note that Powerset understands the difference between being acquired by and acquiring, that "buying" is equivalent to "acquiring", and that we are often able to highlight the actual answer to your question. Traditional search engines can do none of these things. Powerset is trying to match the meaning of your query to the meaning of a sentence in Wikipedia.

However, Powerset is very aware that: 1) Users shouldn't be expected to use natural language and 2) We only search Wikipedia and 3) Our algorithms aren't perfect yet. Powerset's release isn't intended to replace your regular keyword search engine. But, we do hope that you come back to Powerset when you have a question that might be answered in Wikipedia.

So, try some topical queries in Powerset, like "kurt godel." In the Factz section, Powerset knows that Kurt Godel proved theorems. If you click on "theorems," you'll see all the sentences in Wikipedia from which we derived that fact (be sure to click on "more"). Note that none of these Factz come from the Kurt Godel page. Powerset's ability to aggregate Factz from across Wikipedia is unique to our technology.

Now try, search for the Presidency of Bill Clinton and click through to the enhanced Wikipedia page (http://www.powerset.com/explore/semhtml/Presidency_of_Bill_Clinton?query=presidency+of+bill+clinton). Note that we also have Factz in the article outline, which helps to summarize long articles. Check out the second term during the Lewinsky affair: the Factz are an amazingly accurate description of the situation.

Sorry to be a bit lengthy, but I wanted to make it clear the Powerset isn't just about asking questions. We've got a video that identifies all of the features: http://vimeo.com/994819

{mark} powerset product manager

Re:It's about as good as Ask Jeeves. Maybe worse.

[Threnody]

Note that Powerset gets an exact semantic match in the second result. And, Powerset reads every sentence from every (English) page in Wikipedia.

{mark} powerset product manager

Re:I'm Unimpressed

[Anonymous Coward]

Who played the bad guy in the first Die Hard?

www.imdb.com/title/tt0095016/
www.imdb.com/title/tt0337978/usercomments
www.empiremovies.com/movie/live-free-or-die-hard-/13109/review/01

A lot of drivel, no name in the previews.

The previews may not have the name in, but you have the answer in the first result:

IMDB Summary page (click "full summary" on the page google links)

...terrorists led by Hans Gruber...

IMDB Film page (the google link)

Alan Rickman ... Hans Gruber

It doesn't take 30 days. . .

[Threnody]

It takes Powerset less than 3 days to index all of the english pages in Wikipedia. And we're getting faster and faster.

{mark} powerset product manager

Re:I'm Unimpressed

[Anonymous Coward]

Billy Preston played on Let it Be not on Abbey Road

Not the pioneer

[pythonhacker]

Media seems to focusing a lot of attention on Powerset. But they seem to forget another startup which started innovating in the area of semantic search much before Powerset even arrived on the scene - Hakia. Read the following article which does a decent job of comparing the two startups. http://www.centernetworks.com/powerset-hakia [centernetworks.com]