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"Understanding" Search Engine Enters Public Beta
religious freak sends word of the public beta of Powerset, a closely watched San Francisco startup that promises an "understanding engine" to revolutionize Web search. An article in SearchEngineLand points out that Powerset is reaching higher than for mere "natural language." Techcrunch has more details and analysis. For the beta, Powerset makes available all of Wikipedia to search — not all the Web. It's said that their understanding engine required a month to grok Wikipedia's 2.5M articles. The Web is currently at least 8,000 times as large.
Would you like some Grok-amole on your taco?
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
They're faster, more efficient and more accurate. Yes, they require learning yet there's a valid reason and a payoff to doing so. Do we really want to dumb things down any further? If you can't figure out Google, perhaps you should get off the Net.
What a marketing pile-of-poop. All it does is pull out phrases from Wikipedia; there is no attempt to understand the information at all. When I can type in a yes/no question ("Did they have looms in the 1400s?"), I'll be impressed. When it can make calculation ("How old was columbus when the first colony was founded?"), I'll be impressed. When it can make comparisons ("when did the earth's population match the current population of the united states?"), I'll be impressed.
In other words, when it even attempts to answer a question that isn't already in Wikipedia as a phrase, I'll be impressed.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Which is why everyone started using it. It wasn't perfect, just better than anything else. Powerset isn't better than lycos.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
The variance in quality of search results is noted elsewhere. I'm more interested in the fallacy of the claim of "understanding". That, as well as its synonym "comprehension" require metacognition, that is, knowing that you know. It is the basis of self-awareness. this program doesn't even pretend to give evidence of this, it simply return search results. Pretending to be self-aware was accomplised by CYC when it claimed to graps the fact that it was a computer program. For anyone interested in seeing the arguments about understanding and self-awareness, see Searle's "Chinese Room" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room . As far as I can see, only the hype from the company, including the restatements of same in the referenced articles, make any claims as to "understanding". If there were any evidence of that beyond the hype, I have no doubt those in the field of consciousness studies would tear it apart, if they even bothered to waste their attention on it. If in being bashed it then produced a statement equivalent to "I can feel it, Dave" without being programmed to respond in that way, then I'll give it a look see. Until then it's simply a semantic parser (something already done) attached to a search engine.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
A search engine with a broader world view than just the US?
Terrorists!
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