In spite of widely buzzed applause for Powerset.com, which launched today, few are going to see it as a true competitor to Google. In fact, Powerset doesn’t even search the Internet.
Powerset is trying to change the very nature of Internet search. Instead of returning a list culled from millions of third-party documents, it uses a natural language search technology and focuses only on Wikipedia and Freebase. In other words, it attempts to “read” each sentence on a web page and look for underlying meaning.
This approach requires an enormous amount of computing power - it can take a single microprocessor as much as 20 seconds to analyze a single page. Initially, the results will likely be geared toward students and academic researchers.
Google also has a team of computational linguistic specialists, but experts warn that it is likely it will be several years before search services can truly understand human text.
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