"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

I'm Unimpressed

[eldavojohn]

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?

Re:I'm Unimpressed

[Threnody]

Thanks for testing us out with some real queries -- it's the best way to get the Powerset experience. But, if you only ask NL questions then you don't get to see all of Powerset's features.

Powerset is not token matching. In fact, we read every sentence from every page in Wikipedia that we index. For examples of how we understand syntax, check out queries like "who did texaco acquire" vs. "who acquired texaco". Note that Powerset understands the difference between being acquired by and acquiring, that "buying" is equivalent to "acquiring", and that we are often able to highlight the actual answer to your question. Traditional search engines can do none of these things. Powerset is trying to match the meaning of your query to the meaning of a sentence in Wikipedia.

However, Powerset is very aware that: 1) Users shouldn't be expected to use natural language and 2) We only search Wikipedia and 3) Our algorithms aren't perfect yet. Powerset's release isn't intended to replace your regular keyword search engine. But, we do hope that you come back to Powerset when you have a question that might be answered in Wikipedia.

So, try some topical queries in Powerset, like "kurt godel." In the Factz section, Powerset knows that Kurt Godel proved theorems. If you click on "theorems," you'll see all the sentences in Wikipedia from which we derived that fact (be sure to click on "more"). Note that none of these Factz come from the Kurt Godel page. Powerset's ability to aggregate Factz from across Wikipedia is unique to our technology.

Now try, search for the Presidency of Bill Clinton and click through to the enhanced Wikipedia page (http://www.powerset.com/explore/semhtml/Presidency_of_Bill_Clinton?query=presidency+of+bill+clinton). Note that we also have Factz in the article outline, which helps to summarize long articles. Check out the second term during the Lewinsky affair: the Factz are an amazingly accurate description of the situation.

Sorry to be a bit lengthy, but I wanted to make it clear the Powerset isn't just about asking questions. We've got a video that identifies all of the features: http://vimeo.com/994819

{mark} powerset product manager

Next step....

[Anonymous Coward]

Since Powerset can only search Wikipedia, the logical next step is to put the entire web on Wikipedia. Who's up for the job?

Re:Next step....

[maglor_83]

I think we need to split it up by domain name. I'll start with wikipedia.org

The Web is currently at least 8,000 times as large

[nog_lorp]

Any day now, Wikipedia will surpass The Web's growth rate, and set a course for the day when Wikipedia will be BIGGER THAN THE WEB.

Yawn. Here is something really impressive...

[Sanity]

True Knowledge actually interprets your question using Natural Language Processing, and then looks through a massive database of user-contributed facts, combining them using sophisticated inference rules, to give you the answer you need. Even the inference rules are user-editable.

2 out of 10

[KNicolson]

I tried just "Osaka", where I am right now.

First match was an obscure album, then a few "factz" that made no sense.

Let's try again, "What is the largest city in Japan?"

Tokyo doesn't feature at all on the first page! It fairs just as badly with other countries.

It now seems to be slashdotted, so I better quit now.

Re:Jargon pisses me off...

[invader_vim]

"Grok" isn't jargon. It's a perfectly cromulent word. (Albeit one coined by Heinlein in 'Stranger In A Strange Land'.)

But it doesn't give results any differently

[spoco2]

I asked 'Where do babies come from' and it just gave me back a bunch of articles with that string somewhere in their text.

Pathetic, and you'd hope it's got a long way to go really because at the moment it does NOTHING of merit that I can see.

Re:But it doesn't give results any differently

[glittalogik]

I asked it a question I got in a trivia contest - what countries have four-letter names? (There are 10, and google's first link is to a list of 'em)

Powerset's first response? "Fuck."

Funny, that was my response too, but at least I got 5 or 6 of them first...

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.