I haven’t seen a demo of upcoming search engine Powerset yet, but reportedly many people who have are impressed, saying they’d never use Google again.
Powerset wants to let people use natural language when searching, including some words that search engines ignore today (what founder Barney Pell calls “stopwords“).
But Pell lays out a convincing argument that natural language search is important in order to communicate meaning and intent. He uses example searches to make his point - “book for children”, “book by children”, and “book about children” are all equivalent to “book children” to search engines today. His core argument is that there may be no way for us to properly express the query “books by children” without using natural language.
Powerset is looking for big money to launch their new engine. Venture capitalists are always the best source of rumors (the best time to hit them up for information is right after they’ve passed on a deal, or have lost it to another firm). If they don’t have a financial interest in the company, loose lips abound. With respect to Powerset, the rumors are that the company is trying to raise $10 million on a $20 million pre-money valuation. That’s a lot of money, but if Powerset pulls a Google, no one will care.
From Techcrunch
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