Move over Google, Yahoo
2007-09-19 14:53
San Francisco - Powerset, an
ambitious start-up that aims to let people search the web using
conversational speech instead of just keywords, began opening
up its site on Monday for public testing of the technology.
Powerset wants to leapfrog the current generation of search
services from established providers Google Inc, the market
leader, and Yahoo Inc, Google's closest rival.
The two-year-old company has licensed so-called natural
language processing technology, developed over three decades at
Xerox Corp PARC research centre in Silicon Valley, to create
consumer web search services.
The goals of natural language search lie at the heart of
the classic debate over artificial intelligence and whether
computers are capable of understanding human speech.
Many existing uses of natural language search dodge that
debate by simply tackling specialised jobs like answering basic
customer service queries or making inferences about market
sentiment for traders. By trying to create a general-purpose
conversational search engine, Powerset is more ambitious.
Its technology reads every sentence on the web to extract
their meaning and build a semantic index of facts that take
advantage of the sentences' underlying linguistic structure.
In simple terms, the process is a computer-automated
version of parsing sentences into subjects, verbs and objects.
"Search today is like talking to a two-year-old," Powerset
Chief Executive Barney Pell said in a presentation at
TechCrunch 40, a product showcase conference.
"We actually index facts that occur on a page rather than
just words."
Current search engines rank pages by what keywords or
credible inbound links are on them, among other criteria.
Pell, an entrepreneur with a doctorate in artificial
intelligence (AI), and his two co-founders believe the
exponential increases in computer processing power in recent
years, combined with renewed research efforts in the field,
promise to allow Powerset to overcome obstacles to AI.
The San Francisco-based firm is letting web users sign up
to try out features of the system at www.powerset.com.
It plans to invite hundreds of users to its Powerset Labs
site each week over the coming months. The feedback will help
it finalise the underlying software algorithms before investing
in the huge computer systems needed to start crawling the web
ahead of the launch of a consumer service next year.
Powerset is initially showcasing its service with a limited
set of data - the more than two million articles created and
edited by Wikipedia volunteers - rather than investing in the
massive computing power needed to index the World Wide Web.
One analyst said it was too early to say whether Powerset's
bid to involve consumers in improving how web search works will
succeed, in part because of the laziness of many users who want
immediate answers instead of searches that take several steps.