Orangeinks

Powerset: The Natural Language Search Engine

How many times have you searched Google or Yahoo using a phrase or a sentence and returned a search result of a page with just a bunch of keywords related to your search and not the real context that you want? Sometimes you’ll end up browsing the second or third page of the search results just to find what you are really looking for. This is why most people agree that the Google page ranking system is losing its relevance. Given this, most people still use the first page of Google search results as their primary resource of information. Low ranking pages with relevant content still loses the battle in the page ranking system Google has devised. Google’s reliance on keywords in their search algorithm doesn’t entirely mean that all the search results they are providing are totally irrelevant. Sometimes it just takes more time to find what you are really looking for in the Google search pages, especially for novice and average users.

Soon, a new search engine called Powerset will emerge and will change how people search the web.  Powerset is a natural language search company that is building a transformative (learning) consumer search engine. Unlike traditional keyword search that only indexes the keywords that appear on a page, Powerset indexes the meaning of the sentences in each page. By matching the meaning of the query against the meaning of sentences in their index, Powerset promises to often return better, more accurate results and even return results that aren’t possible with traditional keyword search.

The Powerset technology is still under development and there is no official launch date yet. If you must try it out, you can register for an invitation in PowerLabs, a community where users can interact with demonstrations of Powerset’s technolog. You can try out their Wiki Search Sneak Peek demo. It offers you a chance to play with an early application of Powerset’s technology based on an index of Wikipedia. You can also take part and give feedback to help improve their natural language indexing, and suggest ideas for the ideal search engine. This is another great example of user interaction towards the development of new technologies and products.

Tags: Google, google search powerset, search-engine, searching, web search engine, Yahoo

KartOO a Visual Meta Search Engine

KartOO is a flash based Meta search engine which gives visual results of searches in the form of a map. The search engine will select the best sites and place them on a map. In this map, the found sites are represented by more or less important size pages, depending on their relevance. When you move the pointer over these pages, the concerned keywords are illuminated and a brief description of the site appears on the left side of the screen.

Aside from displaying graphical results, what I found interesting about this service is that you have the ability to erase a particular link in your search result. Although it is not permanent, this will give the user the ability to filter the results if it is not relevant to his/her keyword search, or just removed an already visited site. You can also filter the search results by clicking the keywords displayed on the map or the ones on the left sidebar. However, the service is only limited to giving web pages results, images and video searches are still redirected to Yahoo!.

This can be a fun and effective way of doing search results which gives us an alternative to the popular search engines like Google and Yahoo. The GUI (graphical user interface), visual results with screen shots, keyword suggestions related to the search result provides a unique search engine experience.

Tags: Google, kartoo, meta, metasearch engine, search-engine, searching, web page, world wide web