Sick of using keywords? Powerset says it has a better way to search – with natural language. We’ve seen this attempted before. Why does Powerset think it can succeed?
At this point in development, Powerset isn't even open to beta testers. It's accepting sign-ups for its PowerLabs, where Powerset testers will try out the technology on a limited number of web sites, like Wikipedia and the New York Times. According to the various accounts I've read, the closed beta testing is supposed to start in September.
You might have an interesting time signing up for it. I tried multiple times without apparent success, getting a 502 proxy error every time. The next day, however, I had a number of email messages in my in box from Powerset asking me to confirm my email address. I did, and I received a welcome message (about which more later).
But since there's quite a bit we don't know about Powerset, let's start with what we do know. What is "natural language"? It's what lets humans understand each other, and why computers have such a hard time understanding what we say. It's the ability to extract actual meaning from sentences. It means that someone or something receiving a query for "politicians who died of disease" would recognize that state governors, prime ministers, and presidents are politicians, and pneumonia, cancer, and diabetes are diseases.
The idea of getting computers to understand natural language has been around since 1950, when Professor Alan Turing described his famous Turing test in a paper. We have made a certain amount of progress since then, thanks to improvements in technology. But getting computers to connect concepts has proven so tricky that today's most successful search engines use a statistical approach instead.
The most prominent search engine to try a natural language approach was Ask Jeeves. It boasted that users could ask questions rather than resort to using keywords. Unfortunately, it didn't work very well. Ask Jeeves has since become Ask and is trying to reinvent itself to become more competitive. I was delighted to see recently, when I reviewed Ask3D, that its technology has improved tremendously. But it does not seem to be taking a natural language approach these days.
Powerset thinks they have a handle on natural language. Their search engine is actually supposed to learn and get better as more people use it. We won't know whether it's real or all hype until September at the earliest. In the meantime, though, it's instructive to take a look at where this technology is coming from.
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