A new search company called Powerset, has released a public beta version of its search engine, the company claims will give you more meaningful and smarter search results than Google and other search engines. Using simple phrases, short questions, and of course keywords, Powerset is supposed to understand what you are looking for and help you quickly find the information you need. Right now, Powerset can only search Wikipedia, but plans to expand its offerings in the near future.
So Does it Really Work?
For my test, I typed in the phrase "Who is the President of the United States?" Powerset did not mention George W. Bush anywhere on the first page of results. Not particularly impressive for basic information. By comparison Ask.com, Google, and Yahoo each delivered the answer "President George W. Bush" as a natural language answer and linked to sites with a detailed history of the current president.
That's not to say Powerset doesn't have a compelling offering. It does have some other interesting features that can help you search and explore a topic very efficiently.
In my test search, despite the first link did not say "President George W. Bush" the link did take me to a Powerset URL filled with Wikipedia data on our current President. When I ran the identical search on Google I received the exact same Wikipedia entry as the top link. When I ran the identical search on Wikipedia I received "No article title matches."
Kudos to Powerset for doing a better job understanding my Wikipedia search than Wikipedia. But I was not impressed with the way Preset formatted the results.
Powerset appears to strip the Wikipedia left-side site navigation and adds a right-side "Article Outline" box that relates to your search query. It's a nifty idea, but the font size in the "Article Outline" that appeared on my Firefox browser was too small to read. After I clicked on the Article Outline box and selected the "Show Factz" option I was able to read the text in the box. This was a likely a browser or site glitch - I'm not sure.
(Wikipedia layout for test search)
(Powerset layout for test search)
One cool Powerset feature is a tool icon embedded in on the left of the list of each search result. When pressed, this little tool opens up a "miniviewer" that previews the content of the Wikipedia article without requiring me to leave the search results page. In the miniviewer is the "article" and images related to your search query. At the bottom are thumbnail images as well.
This is a handy feature. It bests similar Web page preview efforts from Ask.com and Yahoo. Ask.com and Yahoo just show you what the page looks like, Powerset is actually delivering you content that is directly relevant to your search. Of course because Powerset is only linking you to Wikipedia content it's job of understanding what you are looking for is much easier. I'd be interested to see how this technology might handle parsing data from a site such as Craigslist, CNN.com, or the Web at large.
Despite the fact that I did not get an immediate answer to my query, I think Powerset has some useful tools to search Wikipedia but it has a long way to go before it will even come close to the power of Ask.com, Google, Yahoo, or Ask.
CREDIT - PC World contributor Ian Paul
Weird, I typed the very same sentence as Tom Spring did on Powerset.com and the fifth result said George W. Bush. (Mr Spring said the answer didn't appear on the first page) Does this mean that Powerset learns from it mistakes, like a artificial intelligence kind of stuff? Or do the people from Powerset read reviews like the above and immediately change some rankingstuff, or is it because I use the internet browser Safari? How does it work that I get an other result?