Powerset goes live with Wikipedia search
Tiny URL: http://tinyurl.com/55l6k8
Powerset Inc. has launched its first public product: a natural language search engine that searches the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Powerset’s aims to change the way people search for information by “reading” natural language to provide better search results than traditional keyword searches. Ask Jeeves, now ask.com also has a natural language processing search.
The San Francisco-based start-up, which raised a $2 million round in October and a $12.5 million Series A from Foundation Capital and Founders Fund in November 2006, has been closely watched because of its apparent challenge to search giant Google Inc. However, with search currently restricted to Wikipedia only, Powerset is still way behind Google in terms of a comprehensive search index.
While the new Wikipedia search does have the ability to parse out full questions and answer them, Powerset is emphasizing the fact that the new product does not rely on questions to provide its results and can still provide a wealth of information with keyword searches.
Powerset’s Factz feature shows the query’s connection to other terms through verbs. IMedia Press ran a simple query for the legendary physicist Stephen Hawkings. For Stephen Hawkings, there are verbs such as held, showed and discovered that show up in search results. Under “discovered,” Powerset displays things Stephen discovered e.g. “creation of particles by Black Holes”. The interesting thing here is that this fact was referenced under another Physicist - Leonark Parker but shows up correctly under the original search. Links to the original Wikipedia article are also provided for further navigation.
Because Powerset reads natural language, the search also works in the passive voice, meaning that “Stephen Hawking,” “discovered” and “black holes” do not have to be near each other in a sentence to be identified by the engine. At the very bottom of results pages, Powerset provides more standard search results of Wikipedia pages that mention Stephen Hawking.
Powerset seems to create an interesting mashup of search results but with only wikipedia currently indexed, it had a long way to go to be a fully fledged search engine.
