Powerset – hype or the future?

Johannes Beus
Powersets PR-machine is working in top gear for a few month now – seemingly successful enough for Spiegel Online to crown Powerset as the up and coming Google challenger. Not a bad job considering that, at the moment, there are neither an official beta nor any other usable informations available. Powerset wants to develop, or rather developed, a technology that is able to answer questions that are asked through natural speech. For this to happen, the relevance of the query as well as the relevance of the indexed websites have to be understood – a process which has been repeatedly hailed as the “Google-killer” over the last few years, though which has not yet been implemented in practice. I can still remember that before the turn of the century, Ask.com let users pose complete questions to their virtual butler; Ask just took out the filler-words and conducted a regular search. In 2004 MeaningMaster was praised to the skies but since then we have not heard from them again and while there have been certain large announcements in the last few years, there never were any results. In his blog, Barney Pell was able to nicely detail which direction should be taken but before I have seen a beta I will not believe anything anymore. As far as I am concerned, this hype rather looks like an effort to startle Microsoft or Yahoo with enough of a show so that they buy out the company as not to completely fall behind – depending on Powersets true potential.
Johannes Beus - on Wed (07/18/2007) at 15:12 PM

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