Powerset search engine launches
After two years in development and no small amount of hype, a working prototype of natural language search engine Powerset has been unveiled.
The search engine, optimistically described as a potential “Google killer” by some tech reporters, isn’t designed to just index words on a website - it claims to understand them too.
Although it has been a long time in coming, Powerset isn’t actually spidering the web yet, being limited to searching Wikipedia content. However, this still gives users something to play with.
Improved Comprehension
Rather than simply matching a search query to a website that seems to fit the right semantic characteristics, Powerset “reads” content to analyse the meaning.
The approach requires a great deal of processing power - each page of a website can take as much as 20 seconds to analyse using a single microprocessor - but the theory is that the additional data crunching will make searches more accurate and save users time.
That sort of CPU-hungry processing requirement means that Powerset will probably need to raise more than the $12.5 million funding it has already attracted if it is to index the entire web.
“This is just to whet users’ appetites for more and more,” commented Powerset co-founder Barney Pell.
Useful Results
Reaction to search results from Powerset has so far been fairly positive. Over at SearchEngineLand, Danny Sullivan was generally impressed with its functionality, but questioned whether it would ever be able to capture a wide audience. Additionally, ZDNet also praised its interface.
Other users have been less complimentary, highlighting specific search phrases for which the engine was outperformed by Google.
Drawing a direct comparison between the two does seem a little unfair though, given that Google currently has a much larger resource pool to draw its results from.
If you’d like to evaluate Powerset for yourself and decide if natural language search is the future, the Powerset homepage has a demonstration and some suggested searches for you to try.
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