Why Powerset (unlike Snap, Kosmix, Clusty, and Eurekster) will beat Google - Valleywag Comments

Why Powerset (unlike Snap, Kosmix, Clusty, and Eurekster) will beat Google

Mark Johnson — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 12:01:17 PDT

WRT Kosmix: $7M of funding in January? You are probably thinking of the money we took in '05. . .and then we had another, larger round this Spring. To make sure our exciting events are broadcast for ValleyWag, et al., I finally started us a blog! w00t

Mark Johnson

Why Powerset (unlike Snap, Kosmix, Clusty, and Eurekster) will beat Google

AlBishow — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 09:09:37 PDT

There are sort of more pragmatic contextual approaches on the web presently, one of which is http://linkedwords.com , which organizes the web in a simple contextual manner, clusters the information further and ranks results based on a social element etc, etc,,, I think they are taking kinda different approach from what PowerSet tries to do and namely instead of maintain artificial intelligence huge data bases on the backend, i.e. invisible, they put everything on the visible part of the web where everyone can moderate and further contribute to the contextual aspect of the information etc…

AlBishow

Why Powerset (unlike Snap, Kosmix, Clusty, and Eurekster) will beat Google

Folletto — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 02:59:10 PDT

...you miss another point: the system architecture. Does Powerset have a distributed low-hw-cost Operating System (Inferno-like)?

Google is there for two key 'features':
- Excellent search
- Excellent distributed system (high CPU loads aren't a problem)

The second point is what allowed the first point to be there for millions of queries in a snap without any big slowdown. And to serve services like 2gb mailboxes without any problem.

Folletto

Why Powerset (unlike Snap, Kosmix, Clusty, and Eurekster) will beat Google

anonymous_coward — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 12:16:35 PDT

So basically PowerSet takes my input of: _books by children_ and adds quotation marks around it? *yawn* I thought Ask.com already "owned" the natural language search space - a lot of good that's done them.

Hype hype hype!

anonymous_coward

Why Powerset (unlike Snap, Kosmix, Clusty, and Eurekster) will beat Google

ddodge — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 09:37:02 PDT

Using "Natural Language Processing" to understand the "spoken English" query is just half the problem, and perhaps the easiest part.

The more difficult part of the problem is discerning meaning, structure, and context from the billions of web pages that change every day...and do it in less than a second.

I was director of engineering at AltaVista almost 10 years ago and have seen all the new search approaches since then. None of them have caught on in the consumer web search space. They are more applicable to the enterprise search market, yet few companies focus on that opportunity.

There is no doubt that Barney Pell of Powerset understands the search problem. I just think he may be focusing on the wrong market.

I wrote an in depth blog on this topic today http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2006/10/pow...

ddodge

Why Powerset (unlike Snap, Kosmix, Clusty, and Eurekster) will beat Google

tokemak — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 09:22:59 PDT

This is all very interesting, but are Powerset's marketing and PR babes hot or not?

tokemak

Why Powerset (unlike Snap, Kosmix, Clusty, and Eurekster) will beat Google

m-c — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 09:22:34 PDT

Yeah, 'cos there's no way Google would be looking at this as well.

Apart from the 17 papers they published at http://labs.google.com/papers.html of course

m-c