Powermed
May 29th, 2008
cpetersen
By now I'm sure you've tried or at least heard of Powerset. In their own words:
Powerset's goal is to change the way people interact with technology by enabling computers to understand our language.What that means to you is; instead of just doing a keyword search, Powerset understands what you ask it and returns results based on what you mean. Take the following query as an example: "who wrote mongrel". When you ask Google, you get the following:
Which gives you the information you are looking for, but when you ask Powerset the same question you get:
Interestingly Powerset tells us, right at the top of the page, "Zed A. Shaw wrote Mongrel". Pretty cool.
Limitations
Currently Powerset only searches Wikipedia and Freebase. The reason, according to their website is:
Wikipedia is a primary destination for millions of people worldwide who want to find high-quality, detailed information on a wide array of topics. By initially focusing on the Wikipedia collection, Powerset showcases how our technology not only improves search results, but provides new ways to aggregate, summarize and navigate information. Of course Wikipedia is only a starting point. In the coming months, Powerset will expand our product offerings with additional premium content and exciting new features.I suspect another reason for starting with Wikipedia and Freebase is, they are both clean datasets. Basically they have a lot of information in a standard format.
Enter PubMed
Another dataset I can think of that is very clean and has lot of useful information is Pubmed. I think if Powerset would index Pubmed it would enable some very interesting searches. For that matter you could index the USPTO database or all the open access journals. There are a lot of possibilities.
Conclusion
I have to say, I've never found anything with Powerset that I couldn't find with Google. That being said, I still like the idea and see the power of it. However, it is possible that if you are asking a question that is so specific or semantically tricky that a keyword search won't work, you probably already have a good idea of the type of information you are looking for. My point is, vertical search is an interesting niche for Powerset. That doesn't preclude them from eventually indexing the entire internet, but I'd love to see a Powermed.com.
Ok, back to RailsConf.
Update Deepak Singh over at bbgm often writes about deriving value from structured data.
May 29th, 2008 at 09:55 PM My concern with Powerset (I like the UI a lot, the results not so much) is scaling and, as you mention, the data sources. From what I've noticed, everytime Powerset uses Freebase, the results are pretty neat and that's probably cause of the inherent structure in Freebase (which is what the blog post is about as well).