Powerset Promises Natural Language Search - Powerset's Technology
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One thing I can say for certain: Powerset isn't afraid of a challenge. They're running the site on Ruby on Rails. It's a nimble framework; we've devoted a whole category to it on Dev Shed, as a matter of fact. But no one seems to know whether it can handle the kind of traffic that a popular search engine will inevitably attract.
Powerset is a small company given what it is setting out to do. One recent article mentioned that it boasts 66 engineers. About 10 of these use Ruby on a daily basis, according to Powerset project leader Kevin Clark, so the decision to use Ruby made good sense. Also, the entire organization uses Ruby internally. Clark notes that "a substantial part of our infrastructure is being written in Ruby or being accessed through Ruby services. Our scientists use Ruby to interact with our core language technology...Frankly, we as an organization use Ruby a whole heck of a lot."
As to the scaling issues, Clark is not worried. While Twitter has been held up as an example of a company who's Ruby on Rails technology did not scale well, Clark actually talked with Twitter's lead developer Blaine Cook to find out where Twitter's problems came from. He discovered that Twitter ran into architectural problems that had nothing to do with RoR. In fact, according to Cook, Ruby on Rails quickly became part of the solution: "thanks to architectural changes that Ruby and Rails happily accommodated, Twitter is now 10000% faster than it was in January."
Unfortunately, we won't really know how well it all works until September at the earliest, when private beta testers get to play with the technology. The rest of the world won't get to look at it until the end of this year. I'm not going to bet that Powerset is the next Google killer, but I'm glad to see someone taking a different approach to the challenge of search.
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