

Powerset: Move Over, Google  - chwolfe
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/sep2007/tc20070917_676790.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index_businessweek+exclusives

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ivankirigin
I recently saw a demo of Invention Machine, which does semantic extraction of
a body of data. They integrate it with engineering processing tools, and their
target market is companies that have a process that they can improve.

The problem with semantic search is that out of context, it doesn't buy you
much. Note how many of the demos of Powerset have been on a tiny body of data.

I'm very familiar with the state of art in natural language processing.
Invention Machine is pretty good. Powerset seems pretty good.

It is silly to think that Google, with a mass of excellent engineers and folks
like Norvig heading the effort, will be beaten because Powerset will go public
with semantic search features sooner.

Google certainly has people working on it. Even a marginal improvement on
search or adWords relevance would get them millions. Unless they are already a
sloth of a big company, there is a reason such features aren't released. My
guess is that the techniques aren't good enough yet to take on the entire web.

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pg
What an unbelievable press hit. If Powerset's hackers were as good as their PR
people, we'd all be using it already.

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aston
Huge pre-release hype has definitely been shown to be a reliable non-pattern
for success of websites.

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pg
Yeah, interesting, that one. Wonder why. Perhaps because it costs a lot to do
PR on this scale, and there are two routes to that kind of funding: to have
built something that already works (Google, Facebook, Delicious), or to have
high-profile founders and grand-sounding plans (Flock, Mahalo, Powerset). So a
startup with lots of PR but no product must be the second type.

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gms
These guys are so screwed.

