The Internets are all chattering about Powerset, a new natural language search start-up, that plans to out-Google, Google. There are a bunch of varied opinions about this company, some good, and most not so good. Danny Sullivan calls it overhyped. What do you think?
If anything, Google will simply buy Powerset if it proves its worth.
Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I still think there is a lot which has to go right for this little company before it can really get somewhere versus Google. I find it hard to believe that Google is just sitting still, and not working on similar technologies. Just my two cents.
Pardon my ignorance, but what’s my incentive to switch? People gave up on all the other search engines, even when upstarts like Northern Light were better filters, mostly because Google was simpler. This sounds like more complexity for more accuracy. I don’t see my searches in Google being that hard and I can suffer some accuracy because it’s a low impact to search again. Are consumers aching for better search? I don’t see the new value for me in this innovation, or more accurately, I don’t see any strong benefit to switching or any cost to not switching.
Its too early to say. Om, I think this poll is a few months ahead of its time.
Lets wait for the first product to launch and see what they have. Only then can one say who will beat who.
-miten
Powerset is the WORST brand name I have heard of for a search engine. Sounds like tennis gear…
okay, dumb to be covering a company with technology that we can’t use, but here’s my two cents: the name ‘powerset’ suggests that the team is looking at ‘sets’ (think ‘google sets’ within labs), and my understanding is that this kind of exploration is born of drilling into the data, and applying decision theory and creating a new way to find relevance in results far beyond page rank…elgoog is already looking hard at this, though a quick look at the lead technical dude from powerset suggests that this has something to do with it (perhaps pairing and grouping results by relevance and topic, similar to teoma..err, i mean similar to ask.com, which is really teoma…but what’s the point? hasn’t elgoog already hinted that they’re looking at new areas of personalized search? this company – in a space this crowded – feels like a FEATURE and not a COMPANY, imho…
Powerset founder’s Barney Pell is a Yahoo fan ( as I noticed he uses Yahoo Groups to help people he knows get the right job)
So we can conclude that the PhD guy is a social search geek. Let’s wait and see if the buzz becomes a reality.