Spinfield: Web marketing trends today, tomorrow, and beyond…

Earlier this week Powerset launched the beta version of its new natural language search. This will make some of the Powerset engineers happy, as they vowed not to shave until their first product was finished. With Powerset, you can perform a search using keyterms, or you can type in a simple sentence as your query. The goal is to improve the way people interact with technology. Currently it provides search capabilities for Wikipedia and Freebase content only, but they do state on their Web site that they will be expanding their product and content offerings in the coming months.

So what makes Powerset search results different from what we are used to seeing as search results? When you perform a search on Powerset, for example “Who is Steve Martin?”, you are not presented with a list of links to various Web sites that may or may not be relevant to your search. Instead, Powerset presents a page that is a mashup of data aggregated from several articles from Wikipedia, and in some cases from both Wikipedia and Freebase.

In this example, the page is split up in three sections. The top is a section of facts from Freebase, presenting the most relevent information for the name searched. Not only do the Freebase results show information for the actor Steve Martin, but you can also click on the different tabs and see information regarding the fictional character Steve Martin from Godzilla, as well as other famous athletes with the same name.

The middle section is the Factz from Wikipedia™ section, which presents information that is compiled across different Wikipedia articles. When you click on any of the words in the section, it will show the relevant article sentence associated with the fact, and provide a link to the Wikipedia article.

The bottom section, Wikipedia Articles, shows a list of links to articles that match your query, with the search results that best match your query highlighted. You can click on any of the links in this section to view the Wikipedia article.

Another interesting feature is the article outline box that appears when you click through to a Wikipedia article. The box is on the right, and moves along the page with you. It shows an outline of the article, with links to the various sections, or you can switch the view to show Factz, showing a list of links of the condensed information within the article.

If you want to see more you can view the demo video, and visit the Powerset blog for more information on product releases. You may view several different query examples on their home page as well.

Also, in case you are wondering, a Powerset is a mathematical term. Given a set S, the powerset of a set S, usually written P(S), is the set of all possible subsets of S.

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