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I had another talk with Barney Pell - founder and former CEO of Powerset today. I had written a post earlier this month on Profy about my perception of the recent management changes, and was anxious to talk about Powerset’s progress. Powerset is one of the most promising new search engines which I have covered rather extensively this year. Powerset and hakia are fantastic innovations inspired by some of the finest minds on the Web, Barney is a brilliant, honest and friendly person who is a pleasure to talk with, but the larger issue really is semantic or natural language search as the next generation of Internet tools.

I was compelled to ask Barney about Steve Newcomb’s departure and the rather sudden shakeup at Powerset, but Barney nicely redirected our focus to a more positive (and appropriate really) track about the future of Powerset now. To be honest I did not really expect him to elaborate much about the changes, but I did want to know where Steve Newcomb had fled to. This is really a question for Steve rather than Barney and Powerset has made some great progress. My original assessment was that the investors at Powerset had been a part in all these changes, but this is really a logical perception rather than a provable fact. In the end, the direction our discussion took was more productive.

Natural Progression
My recent exploration of Powerset’s lab/community interface revealed that in fact the company has made substantial progress toward cracking the hard shell of semantic search. In all honesty some of the very tailored and interesting tools there exhibit a fascinating look at the way a true semantic search engine can work. The growing pains evident in the Powerset hierarchy are really not all that unexpected from such a startup, and in fact my friend Dmitry Shapiro of Veoh actually stepped down to assume a different role earlier this year. However, the stability and continuity of startups like hakia (which I mentioned in the original article), at least to me, represent a stability that is to be highly desired and praised. However, the bottom line in building anything is really the end product and how well it serves a purpose.

Purposeful Search
I was curious about Powermouse – essentially a window into how and what Powerset’s engine is looking at, and Barney explained that it actually came about because of their need to get an interface in place to operate these queries from. The engineers discovered that this tool actually revealed a unique and educational side of the natural language database and index, so Powerlabs included a version for their users. Essentially, the tool takes parts of a query and shows the various tiers of results and their parts. It is fairly fascinating to play with, as are some of the other “windows” at Powerlabs.

All in all, the Powerlabs aspect of Powerset is a very well designed and fun interaction between users and the development itself. In fact it almost looks like a really gifted graphic designer was employed in its creation, as I have never seen programming types make anything so aesthetically pleasing. Powerlabs has an array of tools that users can work with that present natural language application across several interfaces. The biggest impression Powerlabs made on me was in provoking thoughts of application of search that have, as of yet, to be illuminated even in discussion. This technology has virtually unlimited applications across the Web and really beyond what we term search now.

Stretching Search
I asked Barney about some of these extensions of Powerset and even hakia, and he said they had in fact considered these probabilities at length. His example for an “internal” application of Powerset was using it to do internal searched on news sites like the New York Times. If you have ever looked for a specific story on one of these huge sites, then you will appreciate what a powerful search mechanism might allow for. Barney also mentioned a far reaching aspect of this type of search that might actually interpret human intent into actual result as in asking for a specific table, chart or list and being presented with that actual piece of information.

Conclusion
Powerset is in collaboration with both Freebase and WordNet, both of which add a powerful subset of tools to narrow the search grid further. Barney spoke openly and highly of the collaborative nature of all these new technologies. Through the intertwining of advanced tools and technologies the Web could truly become a tool the likes of which we have not imagined. As for the corporate “shakeup” – this is really something for the history books I guess.

I still believe that what I called “hard” money is behind the innovation, but this simply means a more active role by their board and that effect only time will tell. As for the progress, Powerset now has at least the capability of a conventional search engine acting upon Wikipedia (as far as I have seen), and in many cases the searches are far more relevant.

POWERSET - Natural Language and the Semantic Web

Barney Pell

Barney Pell Lecturing at The International Web Conference