Search engine understands you.
LONDON - How would life be different if our search engines were more human? A new piece of software called Powerset will give you some idea.
Unlike the Googles or Yahoos of the world, Powerset „reads” the sites it crawls, parsing sentences for meaning with a lot of complicated algorithms. The end result is that Powerset allows you to express yourself conversationally. Want to know who shot John Lennon? Just ask: Who shot John Lennon? Mark David Chapman, Powerset replies.
In theory, this is better than keyword searching. If you have a specific question, it’s convenient to ask your browser the same way you’d ask a reference librarian. But does it work that way in practice?
Not quite yet. As of now, Powerset searches only two sites: Wikipedia and Freebase, a giant database of user-generated information. Let’s use Rudy Giuliani, someone with a robust Wikipedia presence, as our first guinea pig. I’ll start at the beginning: „Where was Rudy Giuliani born?” ”Brooklyn,” Powerset answers in large type. This information comes from Freebase, which takes what’s called a „bottom-up” approach to content. Each fact in the database is compartmentalized into a particular category. Giuliani’s Freebase page lists ”Brooklyn” in the slot for ”Place of birth.”So far, so good. But that was an easy one that Google can answer in the same number of clicks. Now for a slightly tougher question: „Who did Rudy Giuliani defeat?” The search engine returns this sentence at the top of its results: „In late 1993, David Dinkins was defeated by Rudolph Giuliani in his bid for reelection.” Impressive, Powerset scores points for understanding the passive voice in the original phrase and recognizing it as an appropriate response to my active sentence. By contrast, a Google search for that specific query-”Who did Rudy Giuliani defeat”-returns nothing very useful. A more typical Google keyword search-”Rudy Giuliani defeat”-returns similarly scattered pages.
The Times
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