Dec 04
Powerset does semantic
Powerset is a company that is building the next generation search engine, based on the concepts of the Semantic Web.
I just got an e-mail inviting me to participate in their labs community. I was so curious that I immediately logged in and started fooling around. Their website appears to be extremely user-friendly and very 2.0-ish, with lots of tips to help us get around.
First of all, there’s the Quotes application that allow us to search for anything anyone ever said. Well, optimally. All the information comes from Wikipedia, and each result has its direct Wikipedia link for further information. You can see what I got for “Who praised Quentin Tarantino?” at the end of this post.
On the left side there’s the Powerset’s results, and on the right side a regular modern search engine’s results, like Google’s. The differences are not yet very noticeable, but as time goes by this engine learns with its users’ experiences and grows to understand more and more of language semantics. Each search query comes with lots of appealing tools that allow any user to easily improve the search engine. For example, you can score the best results from both Powerset and the regular search engine.
The Arts is a similar application but focuses mainly on artistic subjects. “What did Thom Yorke composed?”
