I've been meaning to write a little about Powerset. The basic story is that they are clearly ramping up - evidenced by the upgrade their website has received (complete with Web 2.0 style graphics, though this is not a Web 2.0 company, unless Web 2.0 means something completely different). Powerset is doing something that I really believe in:
Our unique innovations in search are rooted in breakthrough technologies that take advantage of the structure and nuances of natural language. Using these advanced techniques, Powerset is building a large-scale search engine that breaks the confines of keyword search. By making search more natural and intuitive, Powerset is fundamentally changing how we search the web, and delivering higher quality results.
There are two key things here: the use of NLP and the disruption to the search interface. Finally, information retrieval will actually mean information retrieval, not document retrieval. One of the fundamental models of search that may be challenged in this new world is the fact that search engines are designed to take people to pages. The more we can understand and summarize the information on those pages, the weaker this model becomes and consequently advanced methods may herald a fundamental change in the 'search' business (which will need a new name pretty soon).
BTW, I notice (via search;-) that there are no posts on John Battelle's blog that mention Powerset and few that mention NLP or 'natural language processing.'
It is hard to write about Powerset when they are in stealth mode, is it not? Right now, there seems to be nothing to see.
Posted by: Greg Linden | September 26, 2006 at 10:24 PM
Greg,
Perhaps I could have been more accurate. Barney Pell, the CEO, is actually a close friend of mine. We met when we were graduate students at Cambridge. I've actually taken an early version of the system for a whirl and have a pretty good idea of the vision and the capabilities of what is going to be the next paradigm in search.
Posted by: Matthew Hurst | September 27, 2006 at 07:14 PM
Sounds interesting. If there is any possibility of getting an invite to a closed beta of it, if they do that at some point, I would very much enjoy seeing it. Thanks, Matt.
Posted by: Greg Linden | September 27, 2006 at 08:03 PM
natural language would indeed be a breakthrough but this raises a question about data mining and scalability. it would work if, for example, every web developer uses microformats, but we all know the web is not semantic.
and i have to say it is hard to believe that there is an algorithm that would automatically sort things out.
Posted by: heri | February 09, 2007 at 06:36 AM