Planet Semantico

Powerset officially became a part of Microsoft a little over a month ago and we’ve already completed our first few integration projects: Freebase Answers, improved captions for Wikipedia results, and new related searches using our Factz engine . 

These projects were meant to be achievable in 30 days and act as a first collaboration between the Live Search and Powerset teams.  We have plans for deeper integration in the future, but these projects gave us an opportunity to get to know our colleagues up in Redmond and drive greater understanding of our respective technologies.  All of these projects are currently being “flighted” on Live Search, which means that they are being shown only to a small percentage of users (if you get one, consider yourself lucky!).  Once we’ve gotten data back from the tests, we’ll plan next steps and decide what features will eventually roll into the product.

The first project was to expand the number of queries for which Live Search shows Answers.  Queries like San Francisco weather, MSFT, and Banff national park already produce answers.  Also, many celebrities from abba to frank zappa and even bloggers from seth godin to leo laporte show up with xRank biographies.  But, many topical queries do not show Answers today such as  musicians, albums, films, etc. For this experiment, we selected some of these categories and will return a topic summary with links, similar to the Freebase Answers we show in Powerset, using data from Freebase.  Eventually, we hope to give Answers for even more topics.
 
 

The second project was to use Powerset’s semantic technology to generate improved captions for Wikipedia articles.  Since Wikipedia articles show up in a large percentage of Live Search queries, it’s important that the captions are top notch.  These changes are transparent to the end user, but we’ll be able to analyze the Powerset captions versus the Live Search captions to see which perform better.



The third project is also transparent.  We used Powerset’s Factz extraction to generate a list of related searches for a set of queries.



We also started to use some of Live Search’s technology on the Powerset side.  You’ll notice that we now have “related articles” on Powerset enhanced Wikipedia articles.  We’re getting these directly from Live Search.

 

Powerset is excited that we’re already able to make improvements to Live Search.  Expect more announcements in the coming months, both of Powerset’s technology integrated into Live Search and of enhancements to Powerset.com.

-    Dr. Scott Prevost, General Manager, Powerset
-    Dr. Hugh Williams, Primary Development Manager, Live Search

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Powerset+Microsoft hosted another Lunch 2.0 this year.  We seved delicious food, including sliders and cupcakes.  There were lots of people from many different companies present and we all celebrated the Microsoft acquisition of Powerset with our commerative shot glasses.  Andrew Mager of ZD Net did a great writeup of the event (and he tooks some rockin’ pictures). Terry Chay was there with his huge camera and took a gorgeous set of pics with his fancy camera.  In the photo is Marie Williams of SHIFT, Linda Chan of Powerset, and me.

Expect Powerset+Microsoft Live Search to be hosting more events like this in the future, so subscribe to our blog or check our Twitter feed for details. 

In fact, keep on the lookout for us at TechCrunch50 next week!

English Andrew Mager, delicious food, Linda Chan, Marie Williams, Microsoft, Powerset, Terry Chay

We are pleased to announce our participation in Yahoo!’s Search BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) today. As part of this initiative, we have access to one of the largest Web directories on the Internet, which accelerates hakia’s QDEXing process and semantic analysis of the Web’s content. QDEXing is a critical element that replaces traditional index to allow scalable semantic search. Without this kind of infrastructure, application of semantic technology is destined to be limited, such as covering Wikipedia only.

The search landscape is currently in a dynamic stage of reinvention. Yahoo! is inviting more innovation to enter the market, while Microsoft validates the importance of semantic search technology with its recent acquisition of Powerset. For the latter, we congratulate both parties, yet are disappointed by the fact that we’ve lost our favorite competitor. From now on, we will look for traces of the Powerset-effect in LiveSearch.

For hakia’s part, we will continue the momentum as we keep up our progress towards coming out of BETA later this year. As we always say, the every day application of semantic technology is an irreversible, long-overdue process. It is coming…

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We’re excited to announce officially that Microsoft has signed an agreement to acquire Powerset.

Powerset has always been a small company with big dreams, with the ultimate goal of changing the way humans interact with computers through language. We initially set out to improve search by indexing Web pages based on the meaning expressed in them rather than just the literal words. Powerset licensed breakthrough technology from PARC, hired world-renowned computational linguists and search engineers, and recently released a search and discovery experience for Wikipedia articles. Our technology helps to improve search results and also makes new features possible, such as Factz, which aggregates information from many articles to summarize a topic.

With any startup, the challenge is to take the seeds of an idea and grow it into a viable company. At Powerset, we transformed our idea into a world-class semantic search platform, demonstrating the future of search with our Wikipedia search experience. But building a large-scale semantic search engine is expensive, requiring an engineering effort and computing resources beyond what most start-ups could ever imagine. Because our goals around improving search align so well, Powerset has decided to team up with Microsoft. We believe that this is the fastest way to bring our technology to market at a large scale. 

Microsoft shares our goal to improve search through deeper analysis of queries and documents, and understands that our technology and expertise will play a key role in the evolution of search. With an existing search infrastructure, incredible capital resources, unlimited data, a leading search team, and clear mission to revolutionize the search landscape, Microsoft can rapidly accelerate our progress in building semantic search technology and bringing it to full Web scale.  The biggest feedback that we got when we launched our first product was: this is great, but when and how will we get Powerset go beyond Wikpiedia?  Microsoft accelerates our ability to move Powerset to the entire web faster than anyone could have imagined.

Powerset will continue to operate much as we currently do, working in the same building, with the same organizational structure, and with the same uniquely talented and growing team (apply on our jobs page). We’ll continue to tackle the hardest problems in parsing, semantics, ranking, indexing, scalable computing, user experience and all of our other specialties. But now we’ll do it with the support of Microsoft and vast resources of the entire Live Search team. 

Over the past couple of years Powerset has made amazing progress. Starting with just a big idea, we licensed the best linguistic technology, recruited a top-notch team, built out our datacenter, engineered a world-class semantic search platform, tackled deep NL issues, improved relevance, innovated an interface and launched a great product.  So few start-ups ever tackle such deep, scientific problems successfully and create the kind of value we’ve delivered in such short order.

For now, Powerset.com will continue to host our Wikipedia Search & Discovery and we’ll be continuing to experiment with our product, based on user feedback. But, in the coming months, expect many announcements from us about how we’re integrating our technology and features into Live Search.

As always, if you’re a member of the press and would like to speak to someone from Powerset, please contact us at press@powerset.com.

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Powerset is undertaking a huge task: building a natural language search engine that reads and understands every sentence on the Web. The good news is that thanks to the technology that we’ve licensed from PARC combined with homegrown technology developed by our strong team of linguists and computer scientists, we’re well on the path to achieving this goal.

We realize that most companies wait to launch until they have a completely usable beta version. Because Powerset is a natural language search engine, the earlier we have input from the best natural language processing units on the planet – the brains of humans – the quicker our search engine will improve. Through a combination of quantitative feedback, qualitative suggestions and AI learning techniques, Powerset will get much smarter when people are interacting with it.

That’s the reason we’ve decided to create Powerlabs, which we are opening up to the first group of users today at TechCrunch40. Powerset Labs is a community where users can provide feedback on our product design and natural language engine. While users will not be able to interact with the Powerset open search box across the Web, we are giving users a peek at technology demonstrations that show off some of Powerset’s natural language processing capabilities.

Though the content of Powerset Labs will change based on user feedback, we wanted to share with you what we demoed today at TC40: Powermouse and Use Cases.

Powermouse is a window into Powerset’s natural language index. When Powerset reads sentences in Wikipedia, we go from open text to representations of meaning. In other words, we take text and turn it into structured “facts.” When users enter a query into Powermouse, they’ll be able to browse the “facts” stored in our index. In the example below, when wrestling star "Hulk Hogan” is entered in the first “something” box, users can see all of the facts we’ve indexed about him. Now, if you add “defeat” into the connection box, users see all of the facts that we’ve indexed from Wikipedia about wrestlers that Hogan has defeated. Here’s a Hulk Hogan screenshot. In addition to showing off the power of our index, Powermouse also shows a different type of interface that’s possible with a natural language index.

Uses Cases demonstrates how a natural language query can exploit Powerset’s index. Unlike Powermouse, Use Cases lets users express their intent in natural language. We’ve picked about a dozen use cases that illustrate how a natural language index can return results that are qualitatively different than keyword results. For example, here’s a query of "Who mocked Blair?" that shows how Powerset understands all of the various ways "mock" can be expressed in English. After a query, we encourage users to tell Powerset which of our results are good and which are not. We also ask that users vote on which results are better: the Powerset results or the keyword results on the right. All of this user feedback is what will help make Powerset a better search engine.

Once users have tried out the applications in Powerset Labs, we invite them to submit ideas about how to make them better. Within Powerset Labs, users can browse through ideas, vote on the best ideas and comment on ideas. As users participate in Powerlabs, they’ll get karma points for everything they do. Eventually, users with the most karma will get perks within the community. The bottom line: We’re listening and we’ll try to implement your brilliance as soon as we possibly can.

As a note, Powerset has received a lot of attention over the past few months and we’ve been overwhelmed with the number of people who have signed up for Powerset Labs. Instead of letting everyone in at once, we’ve decided to let people into Poweset Labs in the order they signed up. We want to make sure that each group of Powerset Labs users gets a great experience, so we’re going to grow the community slowly and carefully. If you’d like to sign up, go to labs.powerset.com and we’ll be letting in the next wave of users as soon as possible.

We’re really excited to see the Powerset Labs community grow, to gather and implement your feedback, to share with you more and more technology demonstrations and prototypes, and ultimately to deliver a transformative search engine to the world.

Oh, and we have our first official social media press release about our launch at TechCrunch40 if you are press and need contact information, quotes or screenshots.

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