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August 9, 2007
Technology Review on Building a Better Search Engine
Technology Review recently had an article featuring Powerset: Building a Better Search Engine, by Michael Reisman. In addition to Powerset, the article also mentions Hakia and Cognition Search, and closes with a discussion of a semantic search project inside IBM.I am an avid reader of Technology Review and am really excited to have an article about us in this great publication.
The full article is worth reading.
Here are just a few excerpts about natural language search and Powerset's technology:
The company claims that the engine finds the best answer by considering the meaning and context of the question and related Web pages. "Powerset extracts deep concepts and relationships from the texts, and the users query and match them efficiently to deliver a better search," Powerset CEO Barney Pell says.Powerset chief technology officer Ron Kaplan has led PARC's XLE team since the 1970s and is the author of much of the technology behind XLE that has been licensed to the company. Kaplan says that he and Pell began to collaborate on the idea about two years ago. Current methods of searching used by more traditional engines focus on isolated keywords and broad but shallow content coverage. This leaves a lot of room for improvement, Kaplan says.
"They are really not getting at relationships," he notes. "The best that they do to approximate relationships are words that are close to other words." He adds that a much deeper level of analysis is required.
The article came in time to announce the upcoming launch of Powerlabs, our early user community:
The company plans to release demo versions of the search engine on its Powerlabs website, where consumers can test-drive the product beginning in September. User feedback will be taken into consideration as Powerset makes the final product, which is slated for release next year."The key challenge is to get the system to the point where people can understand how to use it and get real value out of these systems even though they are not perfect," Pell says. "We are finally at the point where we are going to cross that threshold."
Posted by barney at August 9, 2007 8:21 PM
This entry was posted in the following categories: Human Language Technology , Powerset , Search
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