Slashdot Mirror

Wasn't this done? answers.com, askjeeves.com (now ask.com)

the answer to your question is yes.

There's also the pathetic Powerset, which was sold to microsoft for 100 million bucks. Very pleasing see ms burning money on such hyped shit.

Ok, so I like these new search engine ideas but I am grossly underwhelmed here. I tried the input:

Who is David Bowie? Which it handled quite nicely. Biography, additional links and all that Wikipedia jazz.

But come on, that's a simple question. Let's talk stuff I get into arguments over with my coworkers:

Who played the villain in the first Die Hard? Which at least put Alan Rickman at #8. But let's try mutating that to make it harder but still understood by you and I:

Who played the bad guy in the first Die Hard? Which resulted in very little but drivel with no mention of the great Alan Rickman whatsoever ... although it did put Billie Jean King and Madonna in there for some hilarious reason.

So maybe it can't understand 'bad guy.' Well onto another question:

Who was the organist for The Beatles on Abbey Road? Which resulted in at least the first 20 having no mention of the great & oft forgotten Billy Preston.

So you want to know what the kicker is? I put those same inputs into Google and found the name in the first or second result. Granted PowerSet doesn't do the whole web, I'm pretty sure that if it did, it wouldn't have the pretty results that it gave when I did what one of the articles told me to--ask it when earthquakes hit Tokyo. Just imagine the dates it would come up with if it hit a site with an html table of any seismic activity whatsoever in Tokyo!

I think it's a novel idea to mine Wikipedia for a search engine so long as it isn't just plain old token matching like PowerSet seems to be up to. Be inventive, try a natural language parser written in Prolog that digests all of Wikipedia into a huge network/ontology of concepts ... no matter how flawed it might be.

I find them talking about this in the articles:

Powerset is different. It says that its technology reads and comprehends each word on a page. It looks at each sentence. It understand the words in each sentence and how they related to each other. It works out what that sentence really means, all the facts that are being presented. This means it knows what any page is really about. Yet, I'm not impressed. You can try to personify your software and convince me that Baby Alive really defecates like a human being all over so it feels like I have a real baby. But I know it's just software. You don't have to dumb it down if you're going to blog about it. What is this? A pattern matching implementation? A depth first search tree parsing implementation? An ontology builder? Could you at least drop one of the buzzwords of the natural language parsing field for me here?

So does this story actually have more than a startup looking for a sugar daddy to buy it out?

Ok, so I like these new search engine ideas but I am grossly underwhelmed here. I tried the input:

Who is David Bowie? Which it handled quite nicely. Biography, additional links and all that Wikipedia jazz.

But come on, that's a simple question. Let's talk stuff I get into arguments over with my coworkers:

Who played the villain in the first Die Hard? Which at least put Alan Rickman at #8. But let's try mutating that to make it harder but still understood by you and I:

Who played the bad guy in the first Die Hard? Which resulted in very little but drivel with no mention of the great Alan Rickman whatsoever ... although it did put Billie Jean King and Madonna in there for some hilarious reason.

So maybe it can't understand 'bad guy.' Well onto another question:

Who was the organist for The Beatles on Abbey Road? Which resulted in at least the first 20 having no mention of the great & oft forgotten Billy Preston.

So you want to know what the kicker is? I put those same inputs into Google and found the name in the first or second result. Granted PowerSet doesn't do the whole web, I'm pretty sure that if it did, it wouldn't have the pretty results that it gave when I did what one of the articles told me to--ask it when earthquakes hit Tokyo. Just imagine the dates it would come up with if it hit a site with an html table of any seismic activity whatsoever in Tokyo!

I think it's a novel idea to mine Wikipedia for a search engine so long as it isn't just plain old token matching like PowerSet seems to be up to. Be inventive, try a natural language parser written in Prolog that digests all of Wikipedia into a huge network/ontology of concepts ... no matter how flawed it might be.

I find them talking about this in the articles:

Powerset is different. It says that its technology reads and comprehends each word on a page. It looks at each sentence. It understand the words in each sentence and how they related to each other. It works out what that sentence really means, all the facts that are being presented. This means it knows what any page is really about. Yet, I'm not impressed. You can try to personify your software and convince me that Baby Alive really defecates like a human being all over so it feels like I have a real baby. But I know it's just software. You don't have to dumb it down if you're going to blog about it. What is this? A pattern matching implementation? A depth first search tree parsing implementation? An ontology builder? Could you at least drop one of the buzzwords of the natural language parsing field for me here?

So does this story actually have more than a startup looking for a sugar daddy to buy it out?

Ok, so I like these new search engine ideas but I am grossly underwhelmed here. I tried the input:

Who is David Bowie? Which it handled quite nicely. Biography, additional links and all that Wikipedia jazz.

But come on, that's a simple question. Let's talk stuff I get into arguments over with my coworkers:

Who played the villain in the first Die Hard? Which at least put Alan Rickman at #8. But let's try mutating that to make it harder but still understood by you and I:

Who played the bad guy in the first Die Hard? Which resulted in very little but drivel with no mention of the great Alan Rickman whatsoever ... although it did put Billie Jean King and Madonna in there for some hilarious reason.

So maybe it can't understand 'bad guy.' Well onto another question:

Who was the organist for The Beatles on Abbey Road? Which resulted in at least the first 20 having no mention of the great & oft forgotten Billy Preston.

So you want to know what the kicker is? I put those same inputs into Google and found the name in the first or second result. Granted PowerSet doesn't do the whole web, I'm pretty sure that if it did, it wouldn't have the pretty results that it gave when I did what one of the articles told me to--ask it when earthquakes hit Tokyo. Just imagine the dates it would come up with if it hit a site with an html table of any seismic activity whatsoever in Tokyo!

I think it's a novel idea to mine Wikipedia for a search engine so long as it isn't just plain old token matching like PowerSet seems to be up to. Be inventive, try a natural language parser written in Prolog that digests all of Wikipedia into a huge network/ontology of concepts ... no matter how flawed it might be.

I find them talking about this in the articles:

Powerset is different. It says that its technology reads and comprehends each word on a page. It looks at each sentence. It understand the words in each sentence and how they related to each other. It works out what that sentence really means, all the facts that are being presented. This means it knows what any page is really about. Yet, I'm not impressed. You can try to personify your software and convince me that Baby Alive really defecates like a human being all over so it feels like I have a real baby. But I know it's just software. You don't have to dumb it down if you're going to blog about it. What is this? A pattern matching implementation? A depth first search tree parsing implementation? An ontology builder? Could you at least drop one of the buzzwords of the natural language parsing field for me here?

So does this story actually have more than a startup looking for a sugar daddy to buy it out?