Powerset’s Technology, may scare Google Powerset, a San Francisco search engine company, will announce Friday it has won exclusive rights to significant search engine technology it says may help propel it past Google. The technology, developed at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in Silicon Valley, seeks to understand the meanings between words, akin to the way humans understand language — and is thus called “natural language.†It has been thirty years in the works. The deal is significant because practical use of linguistic technology has eluded Google. The giant search engine has said it wants to implement language-understanding technology one day. However, tests of linguistic approaches haven’t made any difference in Google’s results so far, it says Google has shunned reliance on word meanings, instead focusing on finding the most popular pages that contain the keywords. As for relationships between words, Google relies on statistical relationships, such as frequency they appear together, but not on linguistic relationships. The deal with PARC, which is owned by Xerox, is Powerset’s answer to its critics, such as search expert Danny Sullivan, who all but heaped scorn on Powerset’s ambitions when we first wrote about them. At the time, Sullivan didn’t know the degree to which Powerset has focused on this. The move is significant because Google’s own technology, based on “page rank,†has been virtually replicated by other search engines like Yahoo and MSN, and so isn’t as difficult to emulate as it was a few years ago. Powerset could possibly steal a lead if it improves search results by a significant measure with natural language and simultaneously incorporates a near-equivalent to Google’s existing capabilities. Powerset has been hiring lots of Yahoo search experts and others, to help it do that. We’d be surprised if Google doesn’t scrutinize Powerset closely, perhaps even consider an acquisition. Until now, though, Google’s disciplined focus on a statistical approach may have blinded it to the possibilities of a linguistic approach, Powerset’s executives say. Powerset plans to launch the search engine publicly this year. Powerset’s initial talks with PARC last year were enough to convince two well-known Silicon Valley venture capital firms Foundation Capital and the Founders Fund to invest in Powerset at a very high price. The firms and other individuals invested $12.5 million, and own less than a third of the company in return. The venture capitalists made the investment based on an assumption that Powerset would complete the licensing deal. Negotiations on the deal, just completed, were so secretive that Powerset’s executives hid a Xerox PARC scientist, Ron Kaplan, in a back room when VentureBeat stopped by for an interview last year. Kaplan, who has led the “natural language†group for several years, joined Powerset as chief technology officer in July. This is a coup for Powerset, because Kaplan did not respond to some early probes from Google. In an interview, Kaplan said he didn’t believe Google took natural language seriously enough. “Deep analysis is not what they’re doing. Their orientation is toward shallow relevance, and they do it well.†Powerset, however, “is much deeper, much more exciting. It really is the whole kit and caboodle.†While natural language has been a vexing problem for decades, Kaplan said he believes it is ready for prime-time. Chief executive Barney Pell approached Kaplan in Sept. 2005, and convinced Kaplan to help make a prototype search engine. Over time, Pell negotiated with Kaplan to bring his entire PARC research unit to bear on the problem. Powerset’s license of PARC’s technology covers the broad areas of consumer search and published content. In return, Powerset will pay PARC a royalty fee, which is capped at an undisclosed level, and other compensation to PARC for the employment of its researchers on the Powerset project. PARC also gets an equity stake in Powerset. Powerset has the right to offer jobs to the PARC employees, if it wants. Powerset has picked off a dozen high-profile search experts from Yahoo and elsewhere. Unfortunately, it revealed their names to VentureBeat only on condition we not publish them. One name now public is Tim Converse, a Yahoo Web spam expert. Powerset now has around 40 employees. Powerset let VentureBeat see a limited demo of the Powerset technology this week, and we were impressed: To recap, VentureBeat’s earlier descriptions of Powerset’s technology here and here used the example of search “Who acquired IBM?†Google will give you lots of results about companies that IBM acquired, even though that’s not what you asked. Powerset, on the other hand, will give results of the companies that acquired IBM units, including Lenovo, and AT&T. Moreover in our demo this week, Powerset showed it can answer more complex questions, such as “Who did IBM acquire in 1996?†Here, Google completely breaks down. Better, the technology appears to learn over time. Powerset can use abstractions. For example, it scans the Web and finds that Hillary Clinton is associated with words like “liberal†and “democrat†and “leader.†So later, when you ask Powerset “What do liberal democrats say about healthcare policy?,†it will be smart enough to include what Hillary Clinton has said about healthcare policy, among other liberal democrats. Clearly, Powerset faces challenges. Even if its technology does prove to be useful, it isn’t clear how long it will keep any lead (in natural language) in the face of an onslaught from Google. Another challenge is changing peoples’ search behavior, which is used to keyword searches.
lets see. Google is already established and people usually have a certain mindset when trying anything new
well lets see how long it takes coz it going to happen sometime or the other but i think someone should challenge the monopoly established by google.
Natural language, interesting, but with my stammer would I get de-indexed for spam spam spam spamming keywords?
I wont be holding my breathe that it overtakes Google, but if it can give a little more competition to the saerch engine industry, then that will be a great thing.
Every now and then I have heard of Google Killers coming out. But do not forget that Google had the first mover advantage and basically owns the search engine industry. Even if your technology is 10x more superior, how do you get people to use it in the first place when everyone is using Google? Though if Yahoo or MSN took over, that will be an interesting fight.
It's like you would say, most computer users will no longer use Windows and will switch to Mac or Linux. This is not easy, even if there are a lot of Mac and Linux users, Windows is installed on a greater percent computers. The same thing with search engines, let's be onest, when you open your browser you type google.com, if your browser doesn't open with it directly. Of course, some competition will be benefit for all of us, I think, because Google will have to do something (buy them or have something similar). We will see