
Powerset’s Dilemma: Go For It, Or Sell - breily
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/10/powersets-dilemma-go-for-it-or-sell/
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dbreunig
The value of Powerset is not consumer facing.

Powerset could make a killing licensing it's search to large businesses who
are swimming in data, especially pre-digital data. Applying a natural language
program to these archives can associate relevant information and tie it to
other piles of data. There's real (non ad-supported!) growth potential for
Powerset as a B2B.

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djardine
This article is a very transparent shill for Powerset. The company is clearly
using an influential blogger to say they want to be bought, because it would
look desperate if they did so themselves. They must not see any light at the
end of the tunnel, because there is none.

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pg
Sell.

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fleaflicker
Why?

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pg
Powerset has many signs of being doomed. Natural language search, based on
"commercialized" research, taking a long time to launch, talking a lot before
doing it.

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KirinDave
I think it's sad that there are Powerset haters here, of all places.
Especially from someone like you, Paul.

I can deal with the company I work for being slammed on techcrunch, because
that's what techcrunch is for. But to see the people on news.ycomb start
jumping on that bandwagon makes me sad. This is supposed to be the place where
startups are explored and taken seriously.

Powerset is not a micro-social site with some added value like some of my
previous projects. Making a new search engine is a massive undertaking. It
took google several years, but no one seems to want to give any challengers a
real chance.

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ericb
Search could still be orders of magnitude better, and google seems worse and
worse lately.

Console yourself with the thought that if PowerSet fixes this problem, you'll
see a lot of haters become fanboys. Bear in mind, though, that the pre-bluster
has historically been correlated with failure, not success, so people are
skeptical. I've read about techniques that will cure cancer _so_ many times.

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adamsmith
Founders Fund is known for letting founders cash out, so that could be another
option.

Powerset has many employees. If the deal goes through it'd be interesting to
see if MSFT gets them all to move.

Either way I wish those guys luck. Their founder Barney Pell seems like a cool
guy.

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pierrefar
Why sell? Why doesn't anyone have enough courage to try something big and take
on the big boys? Google did it and why can't Powerset?

Come on, someone please COMPETE!

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richcollins
They would sell because their product has no demonstrable value at this point.

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KirinDave
Wouldn't that be the worst time to sell? Wouldn't you be able to negotiate a
higher price with a product with demonstrable value?

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idea
> When I tested the service I had something very similar to the “Aha!” feeling
> that ran through me the first time I ever used Google. In short, it is an
> evolutionary, and possibly revolutionary, step forward in search

Google's search engine wasn't revolutionary either. It was only moderately
better than AltaVista and others. Most of all the visual design was cleaner.
Google's main accomplishment was imo the introduction of AdSense.

~~~
dcurtis
In the beginning, what was revolutionary about Google was the experience, not
the search results. A lot of that has to do with visual design. But mostly, in
Google's case, I think it has to do with the extreme focus they have on
search.

~~~
halo
I think it was a combination of:

* A better search algorithm than the competition

* Lack of paid-for search rankings, which were common-place previous to Google

* Tasteful, lightweight, fast design with a lack of intrusive banner ads

All 3 are largely taken for granted these days.

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dangoldin
It seems that the only reason they would consider selling is that they are not
confident enough in their product. If I felt that I was going to revolutionize
search, I wouldn't sell out.

At the same time I am not in this situation so this may just be my idealism
talking.

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Harj
i simply can't understand how powerset could sell for anything remotely close
to $100 million. the rationale that Google would buy them to keep them away
from MS, seems incredibly weak.

anyone care to enlighten me?

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kyro
I'm guessing his assertion is rooted in his belief that Powerset is a
remarkable service. In the comments, he says that if Powerset
indexed/displayed information as good as they do already with
wikipedia/freelance but for the entire web, he'd use it instead of Google.
From that, he thinks that Powerset is going to be a huge player in the search
industry, ultimately leading a revolution to Google's demise, which is why
Google would want to take them in, instead of giving MS that edge.

Has anyone else seen a demo of Powerset? Did you indeed experience the same
remarkable 'Aha!' moment as Arrington?

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smoody
what he doesn't address (and perhaps wasn't briefed-on) is the rate at which
they can crawl and process pages. i have to imagine that the per-page
computational costs are fairly high. if that's true, then it might not be
appropriate for anything other than restricted, well-bounded domains (which
can still be a huge market, but not a google-sized market imho).

~~~
briansmith
More importantly, Powerset is currently only indexing content that is actively
checked for correctness--content which contains very little deliberately
misleading information, duplicate content, or SPAM.

Do you remember when you could tag your content with keywords and the search
engine would naively trust that those keywords were relevant? I think Powerset
will _only_ excel in domains where that kind of trust makes sense--closed
and/or heavily moderated communities.

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KirinDave
Powerset deals with Spam the way every other search engine deals with spam.
It's not like wikipedia is free of false information (every snapshot is a
unique snowflake with some entertainingly wrong things, like that ReiserFS-
kills-wife-chart).

Sometimes people have difficulty separating NLP from AI from an Arbiter of
Truth. NLP is just understanding semantic information, it's not arbitrating
truth/correctness (a.k.a 'you can't squeeze blood from a stone'-principle) nor
is it some kind of HAL9000 that can take queries like, "9 people who have been
CEOs and who have Christian names" and make sense of them.

In this regard of correctness/spam, Powerset and Google are in an equal
starting position. If you search for "cures for cancer" or "causes of autism"
on google you get some pretty factually incorrect results in the top 4.

In the case of Spam, check out what Google is forced to do with "hot-button"
spam searches, like "Mesolithioma". Where did your standard search page go? :)

Hopefully when powerset has a public product people can play with it and see
that really, what we're doing is an evolutionary step forward from keyword
search, not some kind of boil-the-oceans-and-google-was-always-wrong-anyways
approach.

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dkasper
Is it just me, or do they seem to be trying to do what AskJeeves tried to do
back in the day?

