"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.

Comments

Yeah right

[Reality Master 101]

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.

No, early Google was better than anything else.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Which is why everyone started using it. It wasn't perfect, just better than anything else. Powerset isn't better than lycos.