PowerSet: Nice mustaches, lousy search
PowerSet came out of super-secret beta this week with much buzz. As someone who works on search software and thinks about similar problems all day (albeit in a different domain), I have to admit I was excited to try the company that “has Google scared”.
I tried it and I don’t get it. They may be doing some crazy NLP/semantic web voodoo behind-the-scenes, but I can’t see any way it’s actually making the experience for users better.
Their relevance ranking feels worse than Google, Yahoo, et al. And the only additional feature is that, for certain searches, it will display Factz (sic) which are basically articles it’s pulled out of Wikipedia or Freebase. Only a small subset of the searches seem to have any Factz (sic) and they aren’t that helpful.
It ends up being a poorly-implemented version of what others like Exalead or Hakia already do. Or what a hacker could do in a weekend by putting Freebase and Wikipedia into Solr.
However, they do have good facial hair:
