Powerset Launches Wikipedia Articles Search Engine

Posted by Richard Palace in May 12th, 2008

Powerset Launches Wikipedia Articles Search Engine

What is Powerset?

Powerset is a company based in San Francisco, California that is developing a natural language search engine for the Internet.

The company’s desire is to build a search engine to compete with Google and Yahoo which would act on a user’s questions, as opposed to keywords.

For instance, a user who wanted to find out which U.S. state has the highest income tax would enter “Which state has the highest income tax?” at Powerset, as opposed to “state income tax” at Google.

The advantage to the user, aside from using questions similar to what one person would ask another verbally, is that a natural language search engine would, depending on its underlying programming, return a result that is more relevant to what the user seeks.

As a side result, any context-sensitive advertising shown, similar to Google’s AdSense, would be more relevant and attractive to the user, and therefore more valuable to the advertiser. (Powerset is not currently selling or displaying any advertising.)

Aside from Google and Yahoo, Powerset will compete with other search engine startups Hakia and Lexxe.

Below is the Demo Video on Powerset.