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i simply can't understand how powerset could sell for anything remotely close to $100 million. the rationale that Google would buy them to keep them away from M

by Harj 18y ago

i simply can't understand how powerset could sell for anything remotely close to $100 million. the rationale that Google would buy them to keep them away from MS, seems incredibly weak. anyone care to enlighten me?

kyro 18y ago
I'm guessing his assertion is rooted in his belief that Powerset is a remarkable service. In the comments, he says that if Powerset indexed/displayed information as good as they do already with wikipedia/freelance but for the entire web, he'd use it instead of Google. From that, he thinks that Powerset is going to be a huge player in the search industry, ultimately leading a revolution to Google's demise, which is why Google would want to take them in, instead of giving MS that edge. Has anyone else seen a demo of Powerset? Did you indeed experience the same remarkable 'Aha!' moment as Arrington?
- breily 18y ago
  They have a limited beta (Powerset labs, I think its called). I used it a few times, and really didn't get the feeling that it was anything remarkable - though it could be because I wasn't searching with whole sentences. Thats the reason I don't see something like Powerset ever taking off - people don't want to type an entire sentence when they're looking for something specific, and I'd say thats 99% of my Google searches.
- smoody 18y ago
  what he doesn't address (and perhaps wasn't briefed-on) is the rate at which they can crawl and process pages. i have to imagine that the per-page computational costs are fairly high. if that's true, then it might not be appropriate for anything other than restricted, well-bounded domains (which can still be a huge market, but not a google-sized market imho).
  - briansmith 18y ago
    More importantly, Powerset is currently only indexing content that is actively checked for correctness--content which contains very little deliberately misleading information, duplicate content, or SPAM. Do you remember when you could tag your content with keywords and the search engine would naively trust that those keywords were relevant? I think Powerset will only excel in domains where that kind of trust makes sense--closed and/or heavily moderated communities.
    - KirinDave 18y ago
      Powerset deals with Spam the way every other search engine deals with spam. It's not like wikipedia is free of false information (every snapshot is a unique snowflake with some entertainingly wrong things, like that ReiserFS-kills-wife-chart). Sometimes people have difficulty separating NLP from AI from an Arbiter of Truth. NLP is just understanding semantic information, it's not arbitrating truth/correctness (a.k.a 'you can't squeeze blood from a stone'-principle) nor is it some kind of HAL9000 that can take queries like, "9 people who have been CEOs and who have Christian names" and make sense of them. In this regard of correctness/spam, Powerset and Google are in an equal starting position. If you search for "cures for cancer" or "causes of autism" on google you get some pretty factually incorrect results in the top 4. In the case of Spam, check out what Google is forced to do with "hot-button" spam searches, like "Mesolithioma". Where did your standard search page go? :) Hopefully when powerset has a public product people can play with it and see that really, what we're doing is an evolutionary step forward from keyword search, not some kind of boil-the-oceans-and-google-was-always-wrong-anyways approach.

by Harj 18y ago

kyro 18y ago

I'm guessing his assertion is rooted in his belief that Powerset is a remarkable service. In the comments, he says that if Powerset indexed/displayed information as good as they do already with wikipedia/freelance but for the entire web, he'd use it instead of Google. From that, he thinks that Powerset is going to be a huge player in the search industry, ultimately leading a revolution to Google's demise, which is why Google would want to take them in, instead of giving MS that edge. Has anyone else seen a demo of Powerset? Did you indeed experience the same remarkable 'Aha!' moment as Arrington?

breily 18y ago
They have a limited beta (Powerset labs, I think its called). I used it a few times, and really didn't get the feeling that it was anything remarkable - though it could be because I wasn't searching with whole sentences. Thats the reason I don't see something like Powerset ever taking off - people don't want to type an entire sentence when they're looking for something specific, and I'd say thats 99% of my Google searches.
smoody 18y ago
what he doesn't address (and perhaps wasn't briefed-on) is the rate at which they can crawl and process pages. i have to imagine that the per-page computational costs are fairly high. if that's true, then it might not be appropriate for anything other than restricted, well-bounded domains (which can still be a huge market, but not a google-sized market imho).
- briansmith 18y ago
  More importantly, Powerset is currently only indexing content that is actively checked for correctness--content which contains very little deliberately misleading information, duplicate content, or SPAM. Do you remember when you could tag your content with keywords and the search engine would naively trust that those keywords were relevant? I think Powerset will only excel in domains where that kind of trust makes sense--closed and/or heavily moderated communities.
  - KirinDave 18y ago
    Powerset deals with Spam the way every other search engine deals with spam. It's not like wikipedia is free of false information (every snapshot is a unique snowflake with some entertainingly wrong things, like that ReiserFS-kills-wife-chart). Sometimes people have difficulty separating NLP from AI from an Arbiter of Truth. NLP is just understanding semantic information, it's not arbitrating truth/correctness (a.k.a 'you can't squeeze blood from a stone'-principle) nor is it some kind of HAL9000 that can take queries like, "9 people who have been CEOs and who have Christian names" and make sense of them. In this regard of correctness/spam, Powerset and Google are in an equal starting position. If you search for "cures for cancer" or "causes of autism" on google you get some pretty factually incorrect results in the top 4. In the case of Spam, check out what Google is forced to do with "hot-button" spam searches, like "Mesolithioma". Where did your standard search page go? :) Hopefully when powerset has a public product people can play with it and see that really, what we're doing is an evolutionary step forward from keyword search, not some kind of boil-the-oceans-and-google-was-always-wrong-anyways approach.