There’s a reason I love emerging technology so much: over the course of one hour, the entire landscape can be turned on its head. The rumor out of VentureBeat this afternoon, that Microsoft will acquire Powerset for $100 million next month, has produced the predictable memes: Microsoft is desperate after the Yahoo debacle; Powerset overhyped itself to bankruptcy and needs a bailout; Powerset only searches Wikipedia and we like Google just fine, thanks. While neither party will confirm the rumors, it now seems likely that something significant will happen in the semantic sector over the next couple of months. Having analyzed Powerset and semantic search extensively, I think we should keep a couple of key points in mind beyond the arguments over valuation and hype machines. Read the rest of this entry »
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Back in the old days – or the ’90s as some call them – we utilized the Internet as an information resource. What’s that phone number, where is that address, where can I buy that product – you had concrete questions and were no longer required to speak to a human to get answers. Sure, there were bulletin boards and Usenet forums for discussion but they primarily involved coding arguments and game walkthroughs. The Internet wasn’t truly upended into a community, and all that that entails, until just a couple of years ago. It was then that the inundation of bloggers collided with social networking and lifestreaming to produce a perfect storm of content. (And when I say lifestreaming, I mean the trend of putting as many pieces of our life online as possible – books we’re reading, music we like, etc.) We’ve now backed ourselves into a corner online, raging against the indundation of content even as we scroll through our fifth page of FriendFeed updates. We recommend well-written articles about navigating through the noise, right after sharing 25 items in Google Reader.
The logical next step in this technological journey is to therefore prune, to make our time online more meaningful and relevent, no matter how small the nugget of information. Whether I’m setting out to qualify findings in a drug discovery experiment or wondering when Amy Winehouse was last arrested, I want the most reliable, relevant answer in the shortest amount of time. The problem is no longer whether the information is out there but rather how we can get to it quickly and accurately.
It’s against this background that I’m seeing a gradual evolution of the semantic search market. Read the rest of this entry »
For all my stewing about presenting an effective panel here at SemTech, I think we did it in spades this morning. I’m biased of course but if the amount of active, engaged audience members and lively conversation following the panel was any indication, Taking Semantic Technology to the Masses was a success. Thomas Tague, Josh Dilworth, Mark Johnson and I had an excellent discussion about the mess the semantics space is currently in, marketing-wise, and how to dig it out and shine it up for mass consumers. We spent the first 25 minutes parsing the problem – an indication of just how deeply semantics geeks can gaze at their navels – and about 20 more minutes discussing possible solutions.
Thomas coined a term I’m stealing that sums up the semantics space perfectly: geekery fiefdom. It’s a great description of a sector that is striving to achieve traction in the consumer space, but continues to pepper its messaging with semantic buzzwords and discussions of the plumbing behind it all. As Thomas quoted one of his customers in the financial sector, “If you have to explain it, I don’t want it.”
We came to a couple of good conclusions worth mentioning:
1) Companies in the semantic space need to take a portion of their impressive brainpower and turn it toward marketing. With literal rocket scientists on the benches, finding innovative, well-packaged messages around a product and company philosophy should be a piece of cake.
2)UI, UI, UI. Mark mentioned this several times and he should know; Powerset has one of the best out there right now. Once you’ve parsed out the complex algorithms of your semantics company, spend some time on a great design. An easy-to-use, intuitive interface can vault a product to the head of the pack.
3) Play nice and share. (I’m reminded of that annoying book/poster from the early 90s – Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.) It’s simple but true. If semantics companies were more open to partnering with each other, the resulting applications would without a doubt take this industry to the next level. The close-to-the-vest attitude is understandable in semantics, as some very sophisticated and complex platforms and algorithms are at stake, but I think we’ve reached the point where it’s time to open up a little.
Everyone seemed to agree, including members of the audience, that semantics is poised to graduate; that it’s time to dust off this fiefdom and take it out into the countryside among real users. When and how that will happen is still undecided but I’d bet on later this year or early next.
That’s it for the moment from SemTech. I’m huddling with Hakia in a bit and can’t wait to hear their news, then it’s time to concentrate on the French Tech Tour for the next 12 hours. More tomorrow…
Anyone with even a remote interest in the semantic space has likely experienced the same roller coaster I have regarding Powerset. When I first spoke with Barney Pell over a year ago, the semantic tech sector was an entirely different landscape. I was intrigued by my conversation with Barney and the short demo I saw of Powerset-enabled search. How nifty that the engine knows what I mean by “who did IBM acquire”! But as months went by, we didn’t hear much from Powerset, save a seemingly incongruous Labs announcement. And we heard much from other players in the space. The focus of the semantics community moved away from search to organization – making users’ Internet activity easier to manage – and answering the question of how to take semantics to the masses. Frankly, I had dismissed Powerset as an early mover in the space that had run out of steam. Boy was I wrong.
Powerset’s introduction today of its new Wikipedia search, which also integrates data from Freebase, could have a significant impact on the tech market overall, in that it changes the rules of the search game. Users who experience the incredibly deep, interactive, and intuitive nature of the Powerset search will be even more frustrated with the standard string of result pages delivered by traditional keyword search. Once you’ve dug into the meat of a Wikipedia article with just a couple of clicks, zeroing in on precise actions and entities and going directly to their citations in the article, paging through flat hyperlinks just ain’t going to cut it.
Powerset’s changing of the rules is evidenced by one key statement made by the company: a page of search results, no matter how targeted, is just the beginning of the effort required by the user. Once you’ve found relevant links, you still have to click through to new pages and scour the text for usable information. Powerset’s new way of searching attempts to do some of that work for you; with the scouring and drilling down already complete, you arrive at what you need much quicker.
The Outline feature of the Powerset search is a real gem and I expect will set a new standard for UI in search technology. Having a constant window beside the text as you browse provides an incredibly simple way to jump back and forth between concepts and facts. It could make the browser’s back button obsolete.
What I don’t love about the new search is that it’s currently only on Wikipedia. There are many searches I typed in that can’t take advantage of all this whiz-bang semantic technology. More nebulous concepts aren’t Wikipedia’s strong suit, so Powerset only returns standard results. Example: “Can Hillary win the democratic nomination” returned relevant results but no Wikipedia entry to plumb. So my big “if” with this announcement is whether Powerset can pursue a successful content partnership strategy. If the right publishers, and enough of them, integrate Powerset search into their sites, the long-anticipated threat to Google could finally take shape. No matter the long-term outcome, though, Powerset has raised the bar for search interaction and usability. 
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