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Powerset has yet to launch, but a few sneak previews have shown some promising results; true “natural language” search appears to be well on its way.

Powerset Seems Powerful

The Powerset Blog gives a good example with a recent “Query of the Week.”  Several spot-on results are shown for the phrase “politicians who died in office,” and Scott Prevost, the company’s Director of Product, writes, “For those who think natural language search is just about asking questions, note that this query isn’t a question or even a complete sentence.”

(Interestingly, a Google search for that same phrase yields a Yahoo Answers page as the number one result, and number two goes straight to the Powerset Blog.)

Prevost later continues, “Note that Powerset also knows that ‘governors’ are types of politicians.  This is an example of how Powerset uses ontologies to identify specific examples that match more abstract concepts.  In the second result, Powerset actually knows that Daniel MacDonald is a member of the Canadian Parliament, and that MPs are types of politicians.”

Yet listening to a company promote itself doesn’t always build trust.  For more perspective, we can turn to Read/WriteWeb’s Phil Butler, who performed a full write-up on pretty much everything that is known so far.  “The big news today is that ‘it is on it’s way,’” he states.

Of course, Powerset has yet to publicly mention a launch date, but would-be users can at least sign up for Powerlabs.  Like other companies’ labs, this should let people get a glimpse of the technology, try it out, and give feedback, as well.