Google Rival Powerset Makes Noise
According to Miguel Helft in today’s New York Times, a Silicon Valley-based start-up, Powerset, is set to take on Google for search a the key differntiator: “natural language technology.” Powerset is licensing the technology from Xerox’s PARC - the Palo Alto Research Center.
It’s hard to imagine anyone being a significant competitor to Google at this point. But, if their search technology can understand the nuance of language and fulfill the promise of linguistic search, this would be a breakthrough especially in that mighty Google has struggled to succeed in this area according to Mike Marshall at Venture Beat.
Their remain skeptics out there such as Michael Arrington who believe it’s all hype until they show us the money. I tend to agree. The promise sounds very ’sexy’. Danny Sullivan took apart the linguistic idea in an article last year and begins that most people don’t even use natural speech patterns when searching and prefer “searches [that] are two to three words long.”
Business 2.0 Beta makes another good point saying that Google’s results are “based on years of data about millions of users.” Hard to beat the big G at this point.
Bring it on anyway, Powerset. Let’s have a look.
-- John Ebbert
Sphere It