Powerset Vs. Google: Semantic Search Smackdown
05.12.08
by Mark Hachman
PC Magazine
<http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2304247,00.asp>


On Monday, a story on Powerset launched a new semantic search engine that allows users to input natural language queries to find items. So far, Powerset simply indexes Wikipedia, but the speculation is that the site may branch out to the Web at large.

Ever since the late 1990s, Google has excelled in quickly extracting relevant information. So we ran a quick challenge: using natural language, I typed in five queries to each site, and tried to determine which site's results were the most useful. No query was that complicated, although I tried to be a bit trickier with the bonus challenge questions.


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Powerset Launches Showcase For User Search Experience
Michael Arrington
TechCrunch.com
Monday, May 12, 2008; 1:09 PM
Washington Post
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ article/2008/05/12/AR2008051200050.html>

A shorter URL for the above link:

<http://tinyurl.com/4m7ouh>


Today marks another milestone for San Francisco based contextual search engine Powerset. They've launched a showcase for their user search experience - effectively the search engine minus the web crawl. For now, Powerset queries only Wikipedia and augments results with data from Freebase. The product launch comes just a day after reports that the company is being shopped to potential buyers by investment bank Allen &amp; Co.

I have been able to test Powerset via their labs site for the last few weeks. I wrote about it last month, and the version that just launched is very similar.

There is no way to look at Powerset today and determine if it can be as disruptive to search as Google was when it launched almost a decade ago. That's because it only queries Wikipedia, and so there is little need for proper ranking algorithms to sort the good from the bad results.

But what user can see is how effective a way it is to gather information quickly. For someone doing research, Powerset effectively removes a number of steps towards getting to the final information. It is particularly effective when the information needed is on many different web pages.

For example, a query on Powerset of "when did earthquakes hit tokyo" yields stunning results. Try this query at Google or even wikipedia to compare - instead of just picking out keywords that are in your query and on a web page, Powerset is actually making some sense of the content included in the wikipedia pages:


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May 12, 2008,  12:02 am
Powerset Debuts With Search of Wikipedia
By Miguel Helft
BITS
New York Times
<http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/12/
powerset-debuts-with-search-of-wikipedia/?hp>

A shorter URL for the above link:

<>


Powerset is undoubtedly among the most ballyhooed startups in Silicon Valley. The companys mission is as improbable as it is daring: just like like Google did a decade ago, Powerset wants to come up with a better way to search.

On Monday, the company will make its public debut, opening up to the masses its search engine, which uses natural language to organize and search documents. But Powerset wont be searching the entire Web, at least not initially. In its debut, it will be confined to Wikipedia.

By using language rather than keywords, Powersets demos suggest the company has developed powerful new capabilities. Powerset created an index of Wikipedia by studying the meaning of entire sentences rather than the relationship between words. Similarly, it allows users to type queries as fully formed questions. That allows it to do certain things that many search engines cannot do.

Ask Who did Henry VIII marry? or What did the FDA ban? or What did Bill Clinton sign? and Powerset will come up with remarkably good answers. (Incidentally, Google does a decent job of answering the first of these questions but not the other two.) Powerset also has other nifty features, like its ability to create mini-dossiers that summarize the information it finds and to take users directly to a section of a document that is most relevant to their search.