

Powerset internal problems - abarrera
http://alwaysnewmistakes.wordpress.com/2007/11/05/powersets-internal-problems/

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nickb
Wasn't Powerset suppose to launch at TC40? Wasn't a requirement of TC40 that
they company should launch there?

Powerset still doesn't have anything to show for. I actually got a "beta"
invite to find a bunch of "custom" searches that you can vote on and grade
them. Heh! Imagine if Google said: "sure, you can search for anything as long
as it's one of these 10 terms."

Powerset is just a giant hype machine that will eventually fail. People are
conditioned to type a word or two into a search field and get an answer they
want. No one wants to type long questions and any company that believes they
can somehow change the behavior of the masses is highly delusional.

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thomasswift
>I actually got a "beta" invite to find a bunch of "custom" searches that you
can vote on and grade them.

I was messing around with mechanical turk, these are on there too. I didn't
get an invite, but I did answer a few to try out the turk.

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cstejerean
imagine if instead of typing amazon into the google search box you had to type
"site to buy and sell books", and instead of Amazon you got back Half.com

Google did not invent a new way for people to search, they took the way people
were used to search and made it return more relevant results. I believed
Powerset was bound to fail from the beginning. the problem is when folks
search for email, for files on a machine, for files on P2P networks or for web
pages on Google they use the same keyword based method.

It might certainly be useful to have a semantic search capability for some
obscure searches but that would work better as a Google add-on (and with all
the engineers Google has in-house if building such a technology was worthwile
they would do it).

