5 ms·
At first I thought Powerset was nothing since it only searched Wikipedia and the normal wikipedia search works fine. However if you really use it the right way
by schtog 18y ago
At first I thought Powerset was nothing since it only searched Wikipedia and the normal wikipedia search works fine.
However if you really use it the right way, asking questions of the type "which tennisplayer beat andre agassi" which is an example I saw somewhere then you see the power.
I am hardly an expert but I guess the problem is that the monetizeable part of search is the easiest search, keyword search.
And beating Google there, well good luck...
And the search that Powerset does so well isn't as easy to monetarize.
So as someone said, the best way for them to make money might be through licensing.
I guess there wont be one form of search to rule them all(nor have there ever been) but many different ways of search coexisting and cooperating.
One thing I wonder is, is the scalability a money-issue, ie can they buy truckloads of servers and index the whole web with their technique or could their algorhitms simply be too complex to scale, ie NP-complete( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_complexity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_complexity , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NP-complete http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NP-complete )?
- KirinDave 18y agoIt's nice to see someone actually using the site a little before proclaiming "Wikipedia already has a search, so their site is fail." So thank you. :)
- schtog 18y agoBut is scalability a computational complexity problem for you? Or you think you can search the whole web like that?
- KirinDave 18y agoMoore's law and general improvements to the software mean that even if our algorithm is as expensive as people think it is, we'd be fine. That said, scaling it isn't trivial and I don't want to sound overly dismissive. :) I firmly believe that we can search the whole web this way, but Powerset doesn't have the hardware assets at the time I write this post to do the whole web (or we would have done it).
- tlrobinson 18y agoI'm not sure you can pull the Moore's Law card in this case, since I imagine the size of the web has grown at least as fast as processors have improved.
- KirinDave 18y agoI can't say I know how fast the web is growing. I do have some idea of how fast Yahoo! and Google's search indicies are growing, and they aren't that exponential curve. It's never going to be the case that the PARC algorithm we use will be as fast as Google's algorithm. There is simply a lot more work to do, so they stay a fixed width apart. But the way that the industry looks at computing resources has changed a lot since when Google is founded. They're becoming a commodity to the point where you can rent CPUs on a hourly basis. Also, there are new kinds of hardware that are starting to be tapped (for example, over the last few years graphics cards have become more and more a platform for general parallelized computation) that make the task seem feasible.
- mynameishere 18y agohttp://www.powerset.com/explore/go/which-tennisplayer-beat-andre-agassi http://www.powerset.com/explore/go/which-tennisplayer-beat-a... "Sorry, there were no results for your query: which tennisplayer beat andre agassi"
- schtog 18y agotry tennis player: http://www.powerset.com/explore/go/which-tennis-player-beat-andre-agassi http://www.powerset.com/explore/go/which-tennis-player-beat-... that is pretty awful and funny though. it can do all that but not see that tennis player and tennisplayer is the same thing :)
- alexcharlie 18y agoSpelling correction isn't exactly the problem they set out to solve, nor is it one that they will have trouble implementing themselves or solving via a third party tool.