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The next search frontier: Just ask your question
Powerset aims to top Google by teaching computers to understand English.
Chris Taylor, CNNMoney.com (Fortune Small Business), June 18, 2008
Excerpts from the article:
"What would a computer do if it could read?" muses Barney Pell, 40, as he stares at a large screen in his San Francisco startup.
The question lies at the core of his business. Of Pell's 62 employees, 20 have Ph.D.s, divided almost evenly between linguistics and software engineering...
Welcome to Powerset, a three-year-old company working on what co-founder Pell calls a 20-year project: natural language search, or NLS. Search engines such as Google require you to type in keywords. Powerset is betting that users would rather type questions in plain English. Pell also hopes to prove that it can produce more relevant ads than Google - and enter the $25-billion-a-year market for online advertising.
The idea of NLS is not new. IAC's Ask.com and Microsoft have offered search engines programmed to understand basic questions, with mixed results. But Powerset's program is much more ambitious: It also parses the grammar and syntax of each page it searches, meaning it can spot more relevant answers.
Powerset's main asset is a partnership with PARC, the Palo Alto Research Center that incubated the computer mouse and the laser printer. In 2005, Pell discovered that PARC researchers had been working for 30 years on turning English into software code. Pell promptly licensed PARC's research and hired the top scientists in the field, starting with Powerset co-founder Lorenzo Thione.
That caused a snowball effect as engineers interested in NLS left Google, Yahoo, and Ask to join Powerset.
"If you hire the brightest people you know, they bring their brightest friends," says Thione...
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