Text Technologies » Powerset http://www.texttechnologies.com Understanding technology ... in both senses of the phrase Wed, 18 Jan 2012 17:02:59 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.3 Powerset is mildly interesting http://www.texttechnologies.com/2008/05/12/powerset-is-mildly-interesting/ http://www.texttechnologies.com/2008/05/12/powerset-is-mildly-interesting/#comments Mon, 12 May 2008 14:17:22 +0000 Curt Monash http://www.texttechnologies.com/?p=220 Powerset has done a great job of generating buzz for it’s version of smart search. That said, its current demo is mediocre — and that’s being polite. Powerset currently indexes little more than just Wikipedia, and the quality of its search results is about comparable to that of Wikipedia’s justly reviled internal search engine. To determine this, I did searches on both sites on five strings. Wikipedia typically had more total junk ranking higher, but it also put the very best hits of all higher than Powerset did. The strings were:

  • Drosophila research
  • Bill Clinton foreign policy
  • Home run hitters
  • Innocents on death row
  • Text data mining

Powerset does have a nice set of UI features in terms of automatic faceted search and so on, but these days who doesn’t?

Some discussion of Powerset:

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