Powerset’s Dilemma: Go For It, Or Sell | Hacker News Reader

Powerset’s Dilemma: Go For It, Or Sell

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12 pointsbreily27 comments

The value of Powerset is not consumer facing.

Powerset could make a killing licensing it's search to large businesses who are swimming in data, especially pre-digital data. Applying a natural language program to these archives can associate relevant information and tie it to other piles of data. There's real (non ad-supported!) growth potential for Powerset as a B2B.

This article is a very transparent shill for Powerset. The company is clearly using an influential blogger to say they want to be bought, because it would look desperate if they did so themselves. They must not see any light at the end of the tunnel, because there is none.

Sell.

Why?

Powerset has many signs of being doomed. Natural language search, based on "commercialized" research, taking a long time to launch, talking a lot before doing it.

In general, this is probably the best time for companies that are talking to MSFT re: search about being bought out, due to the fact that:

1. MSFT has cash in the bank and the Yahoo acquisition didn't go thorough

2. They are even more desperate now to bolster anything & everything to do with search & monetization

3. The perceived value of search companies (Powerset, Cuill) is higher since there are very few search companies that can allegedly make a difference to begin with, and even fewer buyers

Powerset is valued at 42 million (see venture beat article), if they are bought for 3x-5x that amount by msft and they can retain their independence they should probably go for it. If Powerset needs the same kind of computing resources, msft would be a better bet in supplying that.

Msft did something similar with TellMe in terms of retaining their independence apparently (no idea how far that is true).

I think it's sad that there are Powerset haters here, of all places. Especially from someone like you, Paul.

I can deal with the company I work for being slammed on techcrunch, because that's what techcrunch is for. But to see the people on news.ycomb start jumping on that bandwagon makes me sad. This is supposed to be the place where startups are explored and taken seriously.

Powerset is not a micro-social site with some added value like some of my previous projects. Making a new search engine is a massive undertaking. It took google several years, but no one seems to want to give any challengers a real chance.

Search could still be orders of magnitude better, and google seems worse and worse lately.

Console yourself with the thought that if PowerSet fixes this problem, you'll see a lot of haters become fanboys. Bear in mind, though, that the pre-bluster has historically been correlated with failure, not success, so people are skeptical. I've read about techniques that will cure cancer so many times.

You can't compare yourself to Google for years without releasing something that actually compares to Google and then expect people to refrain from pointing it out.

I hope you guys challenge and win. Search needs an upgrade these days.

Founders Fund is known for letting founders cash out, so that could be another option.

Powerset has many employees. If the deal goes through it'd be interesting to see if MSFT gets them all to move.

Either way I wish those guys luck. Their founder Barney Pell seems like a cool guy.

Why sell? Why doesn't anyone have enough courage to try something big and take on the big boys? Google did it and why can't Powerset?

Come on, someone please COMPETE!

Because if you are going directly at Megacorps lunch, they kill you. Google did not build an os or office suite, they built a product in an area where MS was not looking, which is the same play MS ran on IBM. I'm not into business gurus that much but Clayton Christensen codified a lot of how those patterns play out; one of his conclusions was that going directly at an established cash cow of a large company is not a good idea unless you intend to sell.

They would sell because their product has no demonstrable value at this point.

Wouldn't that be the worst time to sell? Wouldn't you be able to negotiate a higher price with a product with demonstrable value?

> When I tested the service I had something very similar to the “Aha!” feeling that ran through me the first time I ever used Google. In short, it is an evolutionary, and possibly revolutionary, step forward in search

Google's search engine wasn't revolutionary either. It was only moderately better than AltaVista and others. Most of all the visual design was cleaner. Google's main accomplishment was imo the introduction of AdSense.

In the beginning, what was revolutionary about Google was the experience, not the search results. A lot of that has to do with visual design. But mostly, in Google's case, I think it has to do with the extreme focus they have on search.

I think it was a combination of:

* A better search algorithm than the competition

* Lack of paid-for search rankings, which were common-place previous to Google

* Tasteful, lightweight, fast design with a lack of intrusive banner ads

All 3 are largely taken for granted these days.

The one reason I switched to google was because on the search engine I was using the search results and images took a really long time to load on a 56k modem, while google's results page loaded instantaneously.

It seems that the only reason they would consider selling is that they are not confident enough in their product. If I felt that I was going to revolutionize search, I wouldn't sell out.

At the same time I am not in this situation so this may just be my idealism talking.

i simply can't understand how powerset could sell for anything remotely close to $100 million. the rationale that Google would buy them to keep them away from MS, seems incredibly weak.

anyone care to enlighten me?

I'm guessing his assertion is rooted in his belief that Powerset is a remarkable service. In the comments, he says that if Powerset indexed/displayed information as good as they do already with wikipedia/freelance but for the entire web, he'd use it instead of Google. From that, he thinks that Powerset is going to be a huge player in the search industry, ultimately leading a revolution to Google's demise, which is why Google would want to take them in, instead of giving MS that edge.

Has anyone else seen a demo of Powerset? Did you indeed experience the same remarkable 'Aha!' moment as Arrington?

They have a limited beta (Powerset labs, I think its called). I used it a few times, and really didn't get the feeling that it was anything remarkable - though it could be because I wasn't searching with whole sentences. Thats the reason I don't see something like Powerset ever taking off - people don't want to type an entire sentence when they're looking for something specific, and I'd say thats 99% of my Google searches.

what he doesn't address (and perhaps wasn't briefed-on) is the rate at which they can crawl and process pages. i have to imagine that the per-page computational costs are fairly high. if that's true, then it might not be appropriate for anything other than restricted, well-bounded domains (which can still be a huge market, but not a google-sized market imho).

More importantly, Powerset is currently only indexing content that is actively checked for correctness--content which contains very little deliberately misleading information, duplicate content, or SPAM.

Do you remember when you could tag your content with keywords and the search engine would naively trust that those keywords were relevant? I think Powerset will only excel in domains where that kind of trust makes sense--closed and/or heavily moderated communities.

Powerset deals with Spam the way every other search engine deals with spam. It's not like wikipedia is free of false information (every snapshot is a unique snowflake with some entertainingly wrong things, like that ReiserFS-kills-wife-chart).

Sometimes people have difficulty separating NLP from AI from an Arbiter of Truth. NLP is just understanding semantic information, it's not arbitrating truth/correctness (a.k.a 'you can't squeeze blood from a stone'-principle) nor is it some kind of HAL9000 that can take queries like, "9 people who have been CEOs and who have Christian names" and make sense of them.

In this regard of correctness/spam, Powerset and Google are in an equal starting position. If you search for "cures for cancer" or "causes of autism" on google you get some pretty factually incorrect results in the top 4.

In the case of Spam, check out what Google is forced to do with "hot-button" spam searches, like "Mesolithioma". Where did your standard search page go? :)

Hopefully when powerset has a public product people can play with it and see that really, what we're doing is an evolutionary step forward from keyword search, not some kind of boil-the-oceans-and-google-was-always-wrong-anyways approach.

Is it just me, or do they seem to be trying to do what AskJeeves tried to do back in the day?

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