Venturebeat takes an in-depth look at Powerset | Hacker News Reader

Venturebeat takes an in-depth look at Powerset

venturebeat.com

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I wish they would ..., but here's my humble opionion why Powerset is not going to kill Google. In 2002 a guy called Andrei Broder, who now happens to be Vice President of Emerging Search Technology for Yahoo!, published a paper titled "The Taxonomy of Web Search". Broder analysed clickthrough logs (think of AOL) and came up with a taxonomy to classify what people search for in the Web. He identified three types of queries: Informational (people search for a specific piece of information: Who is Snoopy?), Navigational (people know where they want to go, a specific homepage or web site: Snoopy creator homepage), and Transactional (people search for a site to perform some kind of transaction: Buy Snoopy Case Mod). Long story. However what is remarkable: He and several others after him found that less than 50 percent of all Web queries are informational. Powersets search engine clearly seems to target informational queries. In order to lure users away from Google, Yahoo, and maybe Answers.com they have to offer a significantly better experience. That's hard. But they might do it, and kill Answers.com by doing so. However in order to be good at Navigational and Transactional queries (and that's where the money is) you don't need sophisticated Natural Language Modelling. Those queries are short for a reason. Users have a target in mind and want to go there as quick as possible. And in order to not dissapoint users there, you have to crawl as much of the web as you can. And then build a system that is still able to deliever queries at least as fast as google. And that's really really really hard, and probably the reason we haven't seen a Google killer so far. Hail to Powerset - the Answers.com killer.

Wouldn't taking half of that 50% still be a significant amount of Google's pie? Killing doesn't require taking all of the pie - it just requires taking enough.

Yes I totally agree with you. If they manage to take 50 percent, all of the informational queries from Google. Then they've kinda yeah done it. I just think that just achieving this will be super difficult. To get people to move their bottoms away from Google, PS will have to blow them away. And even if they manage to get 50 percent, it does not equal 50 percent revenue. So much less money to be made with "Who won the academy award in 2001"-style queries than with a dull "mortgage refinance" query.

"This is not a company led by one or two brilliant co-founders. Rather, it is a team of now dozens of engineers..."

I hope they IPO really early. When they do I'm going to make a killing. So many people will think they're investing in The Next Google and will then realize they're not.

'What is the most recent movie Halle Berry started in?'

Try asking what movie she starred in... it might work a little better.

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