"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:Jargon pisses me off...

[east coast]

Would you like some Grok-amole on your taco?

There is a reason query languages exists.

[rindeee]

They're faster, more efficient and more accurate. Yes, they require learning yet there's a valid reason and a payoff to doing so. Do we really want to dumb things down any further? If you can't figure out Google, perhaps you should get off the Net.

Re:I'm Unimpressed

[iMaple]

And the results are not too different. In the earthquakes question(when did earthquakes hit tokyo), where powerset seems to work like magic, google shows the same answer on the first page (though as the sixth link) ("Tokyo was hit by powerful earthquakes in 1703, 1782, 1812, 1855 and 1923").

So even for the tailor made, best-case examples, google seems to be quite on par.

Yeah right

[Reality Master 101]

What a marketing pile-of-poop. All it does is pull out phrases from Wikipedia; there is no attempt to understand the information at all. When I can type in a yes/no question ("Did they have looms in the 1400s?"), I'll be impressed. When it can make calculation ("How old was columbus when the first colony was founded?"), I'll be impressed. When it can make comparisons ("when did the earth's population match the current population of the united states?"), I'll be impressed.

In other words, when it even attempts to answer a question that isn't already in Wikipedia as a phrase, I'll be impressed.

No, early Google was better than anything else.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Which is why everyone started using it. It wasn't perfect, just better than anything else. Powerset isn't better than lycos.

Re:The Web is currently at least 8,000 times as la

[Warll]

Not if the average Wikipedia admin has anything to do with it.

I wonder how long...

[Ihmhi]

...it will take Google to buy out the company for an obscene amount and incorporate anything even slightly better than PageRank into their system.

Why this is a freaking bad idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Search and information retrieval is art and science. I work in the field and let me tell you that if I had a cent for every "make it work like Google" statement, I would retire somewhere in Malibu. Users, in my case they are not end users but integrators, always want to put responsibility on something else but themselves. Until we get people who can actually say "yes, we are responsible for this," we won't get too far with any search engine no matter how complex and cool it is.

People are constantly asking questions about why it takes some time to insert a record into an engine that has 50 million documents and why a query *1*2*3* does not bring back any meaningful results (Google treats it like an arithmetic expression and gives you a '6' while many users expect '*' to be a wildcard). Then we have people who are not able to understand a precise query language that has a grammar and a set of rules you can't really fuck up. Now you give them an engine that can understand natural language and everybody in R&D and QA will soon go ape shit from all of the questions like, "I do know not to speak Inglish and engine is working but not corectly. Fix?" I am dead serious about this. Give people something genius and watch a handful of fools cause heart attacks across the search engine team.

If you want to do something for you and your end users, learn how to ask correct questions in order to get correct answers. In the 21st century skills like keyboarding and being able to use a search engine are almost essential to one's survival. While I encourage all academic research possible in the field of information retrieval, I highly suggest people with extra money to put their ideas toward usability. Make things simple, make things precise and let users figure out the rest. Once we get to the point where everybody can make a semi-decent query, we'll move to natural language processing.

Re:I'm Unimpressed

[Rakishi]

That depends on what you mean by AI, we have a lot of algorithms that do interesting things. Doing something exactly like a human does them is not exactly . I can for example code a program that will beat almost any human in Othello or Checkers while using up a fraction of the computing power.

Human brains have the computing power of a modern supercomputer and possibly a lot more of it, optimized for some specific applications such as data parsing/pattern matching. AI has had to for the past 40 years create solutions that are more efficient than the ones used by humans.

Re:The Web is currently at least 8,000 times as la

[jberryman]

But seriously, is anyone else surprised at how BIG that figure makes wikipedia look? Can that be right?

Thoughtpuckey

[DynaSoar]

The variance in quality of search results is noted elsewhere. I'm more interested in the fallacy of the claim of "understanding". That, as well as its synonym "comprehension" require metacognition, that is, knowing that you know. It is the basis of self-awareness. this program doesn't even pretend to give evidence of this, it simply return search results. Pretending to be self-aware was accomplised by CYC when it claimed to graps the fact that it was a computer program. For anyone interested in seeing the arguments about understanding and self-awareness, see Searle's "Chinese Room" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room [wikipedia.org] . As far as I can see, only the hype from the company, including the restatements of same in the referenced articles, make any claims as to "understanding". If there were any evidence of that beyond the hype, I have no doubt those in the field of consciousness studies would tear it apart, if they even bothered to waste their attention on it. If in being bashed it then produced a statement equivalent to "I can feel it, Dave" without being programmed to respond in that way, then I'll give it a look see. Until then it's simply a semantic parser (something already done) attached to a search engine.

"Comprehension" my ass...

[LunarStudio]

"It says that its technology reads and comprehends each word on a page."

First let's get this straight - It doesn't comprehend anything. That's wishful thinking and marketing. It looks at verbs or certain keywords, flags them as important, references through synonyms, then proceeds to lump them under one category.

It's a smart way to do things, but it's not comprehension. Comprehension would imply artificial intelligence whereas this system follows a set pattern of rules and doesn't 'think' on its own.

In no ways am I trying to put this effort down - it's a step in the right direction. But you have to be careful how you weigh these words.

The second problem I see here is that they choose Wikipedia as an example. I suppose Wikipedia itself is a good site as an example, but it's far from perfect as I've discussed here: http://www.mightyfunk.com/2008/05/wikipedia-equals-fail-death-to-the-open-encyclopedia/ [mightyfunk.com]

Re:I'm Unimpressed

[mwvdlee]

A search engine with a broader world view than just the US?
Terrorists!

Re:I'm Unimpressed

[Artuir]

This reminds me a lot of the old "top-down" and "bottom-up" arguments about AI. Google has a rather large head start using the top-down method, whereas powerset seems to be building it to be more of a bottom-up approach which will be impressive if it can eventually do it well. For more information: http://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive... [alanturing.net]

Getz thez factz

[Anonymous Coward]

Powersetz havez thez greatestz tipz.

How seriously are we supposed to take a search engine that manages to misspell facts with a 'z' on it's front page?

Why don't they go the whole hog and replace the explore button with "OMFGZ SEARCHEZ".

Could they make it any easier on themselves?

[Random Q. Hacker]

I mean really, using Wikipedia as your data set? It's so high signal-to-noise ratio it'll make all their search results look informative. Let's see how it does on the open internet, full of spammers and google-bombs.

Re:I'm Unimpressed

[Reality Master 101]

Personally, I am impressed by the arguments advanced by the likes of Penrose and Hameroff, that "intelligence" (in the sense that we use the term wrt. humans) is a quantum phenomena.

Eh, that's just a "God in the gaps" argument. We don't know how it works, therefore, it must require something supernatural to make it work. The physicality of the brain has more than enough "throw your hands up in despair" complexity to explain intelligence.

A Taxonomy of Knowledge

[kcdoodle]

Google just indexes words, word fragments, and groups of words.

This is an effort (like many others) to create a semantic web.
This means they are trying to discover the MEANING of words and sentences.
Very edgy, dangerous stuff. The MEANING, once extracted, is expressed in still other words.
So SOMEONE determines what a word or group of words mean.

This leads to classifying, identifying, sorting, drawing relations between ideas, concepts, events, animals, machines, planets, science, art, religion, basically everything you can express with words.

This is what the human brain does. And every human brain does it a little bit differently. It is not the things we perceive that define our world and our place in it. It is the interrelations between things.

I have been involved with several search engines, and the TAXONOMY OF KNOWLEDGE is exactly what is wanted/needed.

Is it possible to create one? Sure.

Is it hard? Yep, really, really, really, really hard.

If you created one would it be correct? NO!
It would only be ONE PERSON's vision of the relationships of knowledge, but NO ONE PERSON can speak for us all.

Now all I have to say (after this rant) to creators of smart search engines is "GOOD LUCK"!!