New GOOGLE Killer! -New Search Engine that redefines.

May 19th, 2008. Powerset has been launched quietly, by a California based start up. For the uninitiated, Powerset plans to redefine searching, as we know it. The current search engines do not distinguish between "book for children" or "book by children" or "book about children". These are all equivalent to "book children". Watch the demo video here.
Powerset
Powerset's search engine holds the promise of fundamentally changing people's expectations for search engines by, in theory, offering a smarter, more efficient experience. However, Powerset's beta version, while delivering impressive results, has a limited scope and index, leaving unanswered questions about its ability to work its magic at the massive scale of Google's keyword-based search engine.
Keyword engines treat pages as word bags, indexing their content without grasping its meaning, he said. Meanwhile, Powerset's engine, applying technology developed in-house as well as licensed from Xerox's PARC subsidiary, creates a semantic representation by parsing each sentence and extracting its meaning. "Meaning is what we index," said the company spokesman.
For now, Powerset's index is very limited, consisting only of millions of pages from Wikipedia and Metaweb Technologies' Freebase, a Web-based structured database of information. However, Prevost vows that the index will begin growing within a month after its launch and eventually rival in size those of Google, Yahoo and others. Source: ABCNews.

Powerset Video Demo: http://vimeo.com/994819
Search Engine: http://www.powerset.com/

 

This is ground breaking why?

 

Watch the video demo. It has some pretty good features...as of now it only does Wikipedia though.

 

It seems pretty cool and useful for wikipedia, but I can't imagine the features it provides is going to be very useful cataloging all the random pages on the net. If they ever intend to do that.

I can't see this surpassing Google.

I'm going to bookmark it and use it for Wikipedia searches though. Thanks for the link.

 

This is basically wikipedia in a new skin. Nothing like this is going to kill google.

 

Hi.

My first search failed to get any results, good start!

Regards

John.

 

Shame they didnt think about the brand when creating this. Yeah I "powerset'ed you" lol nice...

Not going to catch on.

 

Google is a god among search engines.
It will take more that this thing to bring it down.

 

its crap....

 

lol i didnt say it was gonna pwn google and take over the market. just the site that i got this from said that. copy and paste ppl lol.

 

One more point google's search technology is not just based on key words alone. There are lots of other things like page rank, etc...
IMO google is the best (based on best match for search results) search engine in the market right now.

 

This thing is also too fancy. Look at google, there are only two things: the google logo and the search field.

 

Exactly what I was thinking

 

Google has more features than people care to use. It's just fast and simple with good results. Plus brand recognition. That trumps everything.

 

Google is perfect IMO. It's my homepage on all my computers. People have to wait an extra 5-10 seconds for pages like yahoo or msn to load. Plus, you can text google for quick answers, which is by far the most rapetacular feature ever created.

 

Google sucks at any sort of semantic search though. All search engines to date suck at semantic search. As the article says, they all treat "books by children" and "books about children" as if they were the same search "books children".

The first search engine that can understand the semantic difference between the two search strings above and return the appropriate results will knock Google off their number one spot. I would not be surprised to see Google itself being the first one to this goal. It is the holy grail of search, after all.

Gogol's minimalist interface and other multitude of toys won't matter one whit, if someone can master semantic search over a wide domain. This tool is only indexing a very narrow and very regimented domain, wikipedia. It will take a hell of a lot more effort to apply this to the entire WWW domain.

Gary

 

Google can't die, it's essentially a higher being.

 

I think its neat. Not a google killer as the title of this thread was made it out to be. Possibly i will bookmark it. Dunno if it is worth it.

 

True semantic search is a long way off, IMHO. All of the nuances that make up language - in any dialectic - will be extremely difficult to harness in the near term for any technology. It will take layers and layers of algorithms and still possibly the "best" will give you choice, not EXACTLY what you were looking for. I have to say that Google does it pretty well, but I still move off the first few pages when looking for something. Google may very well be the guys who continue to get it right and improve it. Powerset currently shows what a good story and a core technology can buy you in the search business these days - $40M in funding!

 

"google killer", lol that was a good laugh

 

No question it is a ways off, how long is tough to say though. There is a lot of research going on, some of which looks promising. Now that you throw in "any dialect", the problem gets exponentially more difficult to be certain. You are absolutely right that even the best of breed will still give you choices to pick from.

I have to take exception with the "Google does it pretty well" comment, if you were still talking about semantic search. If you meant search in general, then I agree with you. It does a damn good job, although I see way too many spam blogs in the returns for a lot of the searches I do. (I would like to serve up a nice dose of rat poison to anyone who runs a spam blog. )

I, like you, expect Google to be one of the first to break the barriers of semantic search on a wide domain. The fact that Powerset limited themselves to wikipedia, gave them a much easier task. Let's see how quickly they widen their scope. I am not holding MY breath.

Gary

 

Powerset just started...its a test version. It will most likely spread out in the future. As to Google killer...not to sure that will happen, just copied and pasted and CAPPED it for emphasis and easier to see.

 

Yeah, even with only wikipedia I typed something like "Culture of Switzerland" and I got, in the top 5, things totally unrelated to Switzerland. Good search eh?

 

It's seems to be great but I can't see it "kill" google...

 

Gary - Agree - I was talking about Google in general - NOBODY gets semantic even close right now, IMO.

The average search string is still about 2.5 words - and has been that way since "search" started on the web. Even if someone(s) gets semantic "right", it is going to take a cultural change to make it effective for the general population because it is going to take a "conversation" to make it effective. Even today, does anyone actually type in an entire sentence/question at ASK.com? No, because that method does not work!

BTW - IMHO, it is not about "search", it is about "find". You don't really go to a search engine looking for something, you go to find something. If a technology can help me find something quicker, I am a happy camper.

 

Nope. That's not gonna work out.

 

searched "dutty fridaze" nothin came up

 

Searching for "the google killer" gives me this : http://www.powerset.com/explore/pset?q=the+google+killer&x=0&y=0
I don`t think the Powerset believes itself to be able to kill google

 

Powerset vs. Google is like a french fry vs. an elephant

 

Anyone dare to explain?

Results 1 - 10 of about 19,100 for "book about children". (0.32 seconds)

Results 1 - 10 of about 278,000 for "book for children". (0.29 seconds)

How is google not able to discriminate the phrases?

 

This thread has been an interesting read, i thank some of you for the informative posts.

 

You are using quotes around the three words, hence Google is doing an exact search for those three words as a phrase and it can discriminate the phrases. However, that is very different from a semantic search, which would attempt to return a list of books written about children, or a list of books written for children. A literal search for a phrase like you did is very simple to execute. A semantic search tries to first understand the meaning of the question, i.e. books about children means books written about children. Then it tries to find web pages which answer that question. That means extracting the meaning from the pages to try to match the question.

Gary