Most of people I talked to was very happy with the information they got from Google Search. Natural language searches on the other hand try to synthesize information and give a more definitive answer. I tried AskJeeve and found out that I most of the time, it gave me information similar in type with Google. A few exceptions are for simple definitive questions, e.g. "how is weather in Rome in December" comparison below.
Recently, Powerset and TrueKnowledge launched beta service with promise to give people more power to get the correct answer to what they want. Barney Pell, Powerset's CEO pointed out that to a keyword-based search engine, "book for children", "book by children", and "book about children" are all equivalent to "book children".
According to TechCrunch, "Powerset is both indexing the web and working to convert natural language queries into database-understandable queries. True Knowledge is only tackling half the problem - the conversion of queries. They are not indexing the web. Instead, True Knowledge is grabbing data from structured databases, like, for example, the CIA Factbook."
From descriptions, both services are quite interesting. I tried to register for both Powerset and TrueKnowledge, but haven't got any invitation, yet. It will be quite challenging, though, to change the short form of queries that people got used to. The new generation's preference, short attention due to information overload and the trend for mobile device searches will probably prefers the keyword search.
Below is a short video about features and architecture of TrueKnowledge. I particular love the fact that it gives the answer immediately and cites facts leading to the conclusion.
Hey, if you want an invite to Powerlabs, just drop me an e-mail and I'll get you hooked up. Powerlabs is where we're showing off early demonstrations of Powerset's technology based on our Wikipedia index.
Posted by: Mark Johnson | November 13, 2007 at 07:51 AM