Remarkable new search demo website called Powerset released today. It’s still in beta, and only indexes one website, Wikipedia, today. As they get more funding they will add more servers and computing power to index more websites.
Instead of doing simple keyword matches like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo do today, the engine tries understands what you are trying to ask and does contextual searches.
Ex) Do a search for “when did earthquakes hit Tokyo?” and compare the results to Google’s results for the similar query. It takes synonyms for the word “hit” and looks up words like “struck” and “strike”.
Ex) Do a search for “politicians who died in office” and compare the results.
It’s really remarkable, even though Powerset currently only indexes one massive website.
This technology will certainly disrupt the status quo and has the capability to do what Google did to the internet nearly ten years ago. This company in the next year will get bought out for $1 billion+ by Google/Microsoft/Yahoo or remain independent and seriously garner more and more attention.
It’s the great thing about technology, competition, and entrepreneurship. A company with 15 employees and less than $20 million in funding released technology that will shake Google with its $180 billion dollar market cap