Powerset Promises Natural Language Search - Looking at the Demos
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In the welcome email I received when I signed up for Powerset's PowerLabs, I saw a link to a short video about Powerset. For those who like this kind of irony, it's hosted on YouTube, which is owned by Google. The one-minute video consisted of product manager Mark Johnson explaining how members of PowerLabs will get to "brainstorm ideas, write requirements, and test out the product...You'll be able to run searches on the Powerset engine and see what our cool capabilities are, and you'll also be able to give feedback on the results which will help to train Powerset and change the way the results come back in the future..."
My chief problem with the video was that it consisted of a talking head. Why did Johnson not see fit to include a demonstration of the technology? In the Powerset blog, there are several entries that focus on how it returns results that are very different from what Google returns. Some entries even talk about why natural language is so difficult for computers to comprehend (kudos to Marti Hearst, a Powerset consultant and a professor at the Berkeley School of Information, for writing such engaging posts). So why not bring some of that out in the video?
I'll have to assume that it's little more than a teaser. Powerset has given demos of its technology; at least one observer has commented on the fact that these demos are always powered by someone at the company, and never seem to accept outside suggestions. Still, they have returned decent results. For example, a search on "who won an academy award in 2001?" returns Halle Berry, with a photo, a list of films, awards, and a description.
Powerset and others have made much of the point that Google doesn't return as good a result for this kind of query. Or does it? I tried the query, without quotes, in Google. I found this link on the first page of Google's results. It's actually better than the result that Powerset returned if I want to know all of the Academy Award winners for 2001 - which would make sense given the nature of the question. And here we actually find a disagreement - Julia Roberts supposedly took the Best Actress title for Erin Brockovich. I ended up going to the actual Academy Awards web site to clear up the discrepancy; Julia Roberts received her Oscar in 2001 for her work in 2000. Likewise Berry received hers in 2002 for Monster's Ball, released in 2001. Even the best technology can't read your mind.
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