WWDC’s on. Steve Jobs is on stage, and I forgot and went ahead and made an appointment for 7!!! Argh… so I’m now off out to F5 Engadget on my iPhone in a bar instead! :p.
Here’s hoping that whatever new iPhone they announce will be available in Apple stores to be cracked like old [...]

edit: Jason has written a similar article about Powerset and what he would do as CEO over at calcanis.com. I thoroughly recommend the read!

The search engine space hasn’t had many new large entrants in the past few years (if you exclude Microsoft’s no-brainer of Live Search) but now there seems to be a slew of new contenders. Mahalo (one of Jason Calacanis’ projects that I’ve posted about a few times),  and now Powerset; an interesting project that claims to use natural language semantics to interpret your search question and provide fast and accurate results.

Currently this is limited by its source material (wikipedia), and so the searches may only be factual in nature, so let’s take a look and figure out how well this thing does against Google (and for novelty), Mahalo.

So… some search questions. Seeing as Powerset requires factual based questions, to be fair, all will be factual in nature.

Aims:

1. How long did Queen Victoria reign over England?

2. What is the atomic weight of Boron?

3. How many different types of Swallow are there?

4. What is the largest muscle in the human body?

I think that these represent a pretty good spread of questions over various topics. Now… to see how they all sum up!

1. How Long did Queen Victoria reign over England?

Google: Varying the search text, between the first and third results contain the answer in the summary text. :)

Powerset: The very first result contains the answer (also highlighted). :)

Mahalo: Typing ‘Queen Victoria’ returns a page with the answer in the nice Guide Note box in the corner. Another win: all three seem pretty good with history!

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2. What is the atomic weight of Boron?

Google: The first result contains the answer in the summary text.

Powerset: The first result contains the answer highlighted.

Mahalo: Not indexed on Mahalo… does give Google results though so see above.

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3. How many different types of swallow are there?

Google: Fourth result contains the answer in the summary text.

Powerset: The first result does contain the answer, although not obviously and it does not appear in the summary text.

Mahalo: Mahalo did not have a page on the topic, however again, the Google results yielded the same as above.

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4. What is the largest muscle in the human body?

Google: The first result contains the answer in the summary text.

Powerset: I couldn’t actually find the answer at all. I’m sure that it was in one of the pages somewhere, but not in any summary text on the first few pages of results, or ‘obviously’ within any of the first results.

Mahalo: Mahalo did not have a page on the topic but gave good Google results.

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Okay, so how did Powersets do? Not bad at all.

I was actually pleasantly surprised; I had set out to show that it was not even as good as Google, but it seemed to pretty much equal it most of the time. With the added plus that you can type the search in natural language. Its natural language support seems limited to simple sentences with no logic (e.g. and, not…) (at least from what I could tell), but it could seem easier for a novice.

However, despite offering a useful service; I don’t see where it would fit in to my (or anyone’s?) life. It’s not a complete search engine… I couldn’t use this as my home page. I couldn’t rely on it for day to day searching. AND… honestly, if I’m looking for encyclopaedic content, why not just go to Wikipedia.org?

The only way I can imagine using this is if they say made a Sidebar gadget or widget out of it, that I could just type my search in and away I go, rather than remember another search site when Google works just as well.

What I did end up learning here though, is that Mahalo is *actually* pretty good. It seems to crash my Firefox instantly :(, I don’t know if that’s the fault of FF3B5 or the site, or (quite likely) Flash Player (don’t know if they use any flash), but it has crippled my system of late, so you’ll notice the Mahalo pics are in IE, but I really like it.

Mahalo seems to have gotten it right… I will seriously consider swapping over to using Mahalo as a home page because it accepts the fact that their own data is limited. Mahalo seems to focus more on creating its own articles in the areas of popular culture, trivia, how tos etc… This is really useful content that doesn’t really exist in a consolidated manner anywhere else. But it then provides you with outside links for things that it doesn’t have. So essentially you get added value, and don’t lose anything from what you had before.

Okay, this is getting long, but… Powersets? Does it work? Yes. Is it new? I hope not; I really thought we were at this stage a few years ago (http://www.lexxe.com http://www.msdewey.com)

Chris