Powerset, the best search engine ever… for Wikipedia only?
Powerset is continuing with their promise to release a new example query every week. This week they seek to answer the question “what did steve jobs say about the about the iPod?” with results from Wikipedia. It’s fairly clear from the results that Google has trouble determining what the Real Steve Jobs had to say and does a poor job summarizing what it does find. Many of the results Google does return are broken off be ellipses and the actual article needs to be consulted.
In contrast, Powerset handles the search with aplomb and returns related video results as well. Each result highlights the full relevant section with the subject of the search emphasized with an additional color. Powerset also performs a meta-search automatically related to the original query. In this case there’s a mini synopsis of Steve Jobs, likely pulled from Freebase’s data.
I’m wondering if the video search results are powered by Powerset’s yet-to-be-made-announced acquisition. Steve Newcomb mentions the upcoming announcement on his blog:
Hint: We are going to be announcing some pretty interesting stuff over the next couple of weeks. We have been holding back for quite a while and we are brimming with news (double hint: we acquired someone)
So far all of Powerset’s search examples that I’ve seen have been limited to Wikipedia’s content and access to the public have been tightly controlled. This brings up an interesting question: Will it scale? Natural language processing is quite computationally intense. I’m not convinced that Powerset’s algorithms are able of handling searches of the entire web with response times that end users will find acceptable. Perhaps by limiting their testing to Wikipedia they’re skirting the issue for now and hoping to be quickly acquired by a company experienced in scaling-out, building massive services and/or in need of a better search engine as Don Dodge posited.
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