KWPro.net

After months of speculation (maybe even years) over at TechCrunch and the acquisition by Microsoft, Powerset has disappeared into nothingness.  It was supposed to be the "Google killer" (hah!  That's what everyone says!) but the only thing it could do is index Wikipedia articles....and not that well, mind you.

But even after the acquisition, one must wonder why the search engine that supposedly is going to use natural language parsing hasn't begun indexing more sources. The quesitons you ask it are very limited.  For instance, try asking something like, "What is the yen to dollar conversion?"  You won't get anything like you expect.  Now, place the keywords "yen dollar exchange rate" into Google and you get not only the correct answer, but it's highlighted because they've begun integrating results from other sites into their system!

Or ask a question like "Which companies are using python?"  You won't get anything that you'd expect like an answer.

In fact, the answer that Powerset provides isn't very "answer-like."  Meaning, it doesn't sound like you're having a conversation with anyone.  It just gives you results for anything that isn't the simplest question.  Perhaps, part of the fault is that the index is very small, only containing entries for Wikipedia and the Freebase.  Still, I would imagine that they ought to expand more rapidly and attempt to increase the size of their index to capture more information out there.  For instance, IMDB or any significant, trusted source of data.

We certainly are far away from HAL or the Prisoner (remember the episode where they ask the computer simply, "Why?").  But still, I would think an engine like this ought to improve more rapidly with all the capital infused into it.  Or perhaps, we're seeing the reality of a monstrous company purchasing something smaller in that the integration process takes a long time and bureaucracy rather than rapid changes are the real priorities (hence why I've been stating to Yahoo that integrating with Microsoft is just senseless).