Will Powerset Topple Google?
This new start up makes some bold claims:
Powerset’s plan from the beginning was to concentrate on revolutionizing the core of search just like Google did 8 years ago (WOW that really seams like a long time ago).
Yeah, Google made a big splash and there was a lot of buzz that pushed them to the front of the search engine race. It wasn’t that difficult. There wasn’t really any competition for Google in 1998. But Powerset has its work cut out for it.
Steve Newcomb is founder and COO of Powerset. He outlines a three-pronged approach for rolling out his new search engine format:
1) Let people see Powerset’s search engine for the First Time
2) Tell people about our technology licensing and strategic partnership deal with Xerox PARC
3) Let people know about the people who are on our team
OK. There’s nothing really innovative about that approach. They’re going to tell people, tell people and tell people. We certainly hope so. But what exactly are they going to tell people? We hope they’re going to tell us they’ve fixed Google’s problems, but we’re not holding our breath.
Powerset actually went public on Oct. 31, 2006 with a blog post on its website. But there hasn’t been another blog post since. Powerset has been communicating primarily through two of its founders’ blogs and press releases. So when are we going to get to see the innovation? According to Newcomb, you can link to LinkedIn profile and they will let you test a beta version of the site when they get ready to go.
The most we have from Powerset at this point is a statement on their website that gives us some clue as to how they believe they’ll knock Google off the search engine mountain:
Powerset is a Silicon Valley company building a transformative consumer search engine based on natural language processing.
Our unique innovations in search are rooted in breakthrough technologies that take advantage of the structure and nuances of natural language. Using these advanced techniques, Powerset is building a large-scale search engine that breaks the confines of keyword search.
By making search more natural and intuitive, Powerset is fundamentally changing how we search the web, and delivering higher quality results.
The Powerset team further tells us that they’ve assembled an all star team of talented individuals from other technology companies such as Yahoo!, Ask.com, Altavista, Microsoft, NASA, PARC, SRI and Apple, just to name a few. Among these all star players are Chairman Barney Pell, Ph.D., an expert on artificial intelligence, and Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal. It seems these aren’t just chumps talking trash.
The question that should be on everyone’s minds is “What is natural language processing exactly? The statement on the company’s website doesn’t give us any clues. It sounds a lot like what AskJeeves.com tried to do years ago, but failed. As you know, Ask.com dropped Jeeves and changed its search model to conform to the way search is currently done. That was unarguably an improvement, but is it good?
VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall reported on Powerset in not much of an enthusiastic way with these words:
As much as some people want to deny it, search has largely been solved by Google and others, at least for the average person. Yes, there are many incremental improvements that should be made, but is there anything new that Google’s thousand-odd engineers (or Yahoo’s for that matter) can’t figure out and copy within a few months?
SiliconValleyWatcher Tom Foremski took issue with that statement on his blog:
Yes. Search actually is quite broken in that you can’t do anything with the results except click on them. You can’t analyze the results to come up with answers to the underlying questions that are behind every search query. You can’t understand whether the hit results are blogs or About.com pages or spam sites or newspaper articles. There’s no system for authority or authenticity of pages or content. And the whole system of valuing pointed-to pages is loaded with vulnerability to spam sites and SEO actions. If I post an article that Google is about to buy Apple, that’s going to get a whole lot of googlejuice, regardless of the fact that it is completely and utterly false.
So, no, I wouldn’t say search is solved.
We agree with Foremski. Search is far from solved. You go to Google and almost any search will have outdated information in the top 10. I did a search for “MySpace marketing,” a growing area of interest, and 7 of the top 10 organic search listings contained outdated information and broken links on their websites. Google’s algorithms are supposed to combat those. They don’t. Not even near perfectly.
Another problem with search is that enterprise and commerce have all but hijacked it. Used to, you could go online and search for information and find noncommercial sites that provided something useful. Sure, you might have had to dig a little, but you’d find it. Today, you’ll have to dig a lot further and if you find useful information at all it will more than likely be on a commercial website or a splog that is stealing content in order to make pennies on AdSense.
Ask.com is making an attempt to solve these problems but so far has not generated any buzz to get enough traffic to its site to overcome Google. The question is, will Powerset be any different. Other search engines have tried and failed, what makes these guys think they can succeed? For one thing, they’ve got a big bank roll, or so they say. And it will take some money to succeed - it will take a lot of money. But even a lot of money won’t ensure success. The one that will ensure success is a good product, a search model that works, that people will understand and that will generate the kinds of results that we can expect from a search engine.
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