Powerset launched last week with much fanfare after a long wait. Powerset is a Natural Language Search company which started with search of wikipedia/freebase articles. Similar to Google, you can enter keywords, phrases or ask specific questions. Their technology aggregates information from multiple articles and provides most relevant references to articles, and in some cases directly answering the questions.
Most of the coverage focused around references to Michael Arrington post on TechCrunch and Danny Sullivan's post on SearchEngineLand. I had a chance to play with their stuff myself and thought I'd share my perspective.
After playing around with different queries that seemed to disappoint people, it was interesting to note the snap judgement aspects. E.g, Vanessa Fox's blog talks about about her bankruptcy reference. What most people fail to realize is that Google had the opportunity to test and iterate it's search at Yahoo's expense for a long time. Large search engines do not evolve overnight. The flip side of that is that consumers will not make the shift unless they find something that delivers better value and search experience. How Powerset conquers the mind share and market share in search remains to be seen, but there are clearly proof points to that pipe dream.
I started off with a simple query "what movies did bruce willis star in" in both Powerset and Google. Believe it or not, Powerset just nailed the responses that I was looking for. Google on the other hand brought up enough references but none that was really right on the mark. Infact, interestingly enough the third link's title was "Bruce Willis to star in". Powerset's results from Freebase also included pictures.
Similarly, I tried a bunch more queries, which had natural language search intent than just keywords until I finally ended up at "what charges were brought against bill clinton"? Google had a reference to Wikipedia article on the 4th link but if you clicked on that link, you'd quickly be lost in a ton of irrelevant stuff. Powerset, I thought, had a lot better results, though the 2nd link wasn't necessary relevant.
I then started trying a couple variations on google and finally found that "charges against bill clinton" seemed to yield better results and seemed comparable. It's not clear what percentage of general searches are in proper construct form (vs. keywords) but it seems to me Powerset does deliver for such queries.
The biggest downside for my searches was where Powerset lacked content from multiple sources. Freebase or Wikipedia have very little information for searches such as "Safeway" (I'd have expected a link to the website) but Google over the past years has THE index for all webpages. I'd be eager to see more content from different sources, which I think will truly bring out the differentiation.
Ultimately, the challenge with such technologies is one of user adoption, consumers cannot comprehend that technology has evolved so much that it's capable of reading,understanding and responding as we humans do. How we engage users to harness that power ultimately decides success or failure!
Disclosure: I'm founder of BooRah, an NLP Restaurant Search Company that extracts sentiments from user reviews and blogs and generates summaries and ratings for restaurants across the country. The ideas expressed hereby are as a blogger and may not reflect BooRah's perspective.
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