Powerset: An Entirely New Way To Search And Discover?

There has been a lot of buzz surrounding Powerset and to be honest, I have chosen to ignore most of it. When looking at new search technologies that claim natural language search capabilities and other mind blowing semantic feats, I tend to tune out. It is not that I am not interested in new search technologies; it is just that I have grown skeptical of such claims and am sick of searching for the next best thing in search technology. I figure, if the technology is so great, I will get to it eventually.


Today was a bit different. Through the power of good press release headline writing, Powerset was able to grab my attention. The release read, “Powerset Reinvents the Search and Discovery Experience for Wikipedia(TM) Articles”. Somehow they must have known that one of my passion points is discovery (as it relates to navigating the web) as it is my belief that social media lay at the cross roads of search and discovery (at least in the sense that social media aids in people’s ability to find new things based on topics and items discussed amongst their friends. I guess this is not just about social media, it is about being social).


Here are some of the new features in Powerset:





  • Factz -- When users enter a topic query, Powerset assembles a compact summary of interesting, and sometimes surprising Factz, extracted from pages across Wikipedia




  • Dossiers -- Powerset creates a summary of information found in Freebase and Wikipedia to give users a quick overview about a topic




  • Answers -- For many questions, Powerset automatically assembles an answer list from sentences in Wikipedia or data in Freebase




  • Semantic Highlighting -- The most relevant search results are highlighted based on the meaning of a user's question




  • Minibrowser -- A result can be expanded to show the snippet in the context of the full Wikipedia article




And a couple of screenshots that I took while exploring:







And finally a promotional video:





Powerset Demo Video from officialpowerset on Vimeo.



All in all I found using Powerset to be an enjoyable experience. When doing research I may try Powerset a few times. I guess the question is will this technology apply to the masses of searchers?



Thoughts?




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