Powerset Announces Powerset Labs: And The Hype Continues

By Amit Chowdhry ● Sep 18, 2007

To date, Powerset is probably one of the most hyped startups that I have heard of so far. The company has raised millions of dollars as of 2006, has only a few testers, and does not have a live product out yet.

The way I see Google right now is that they are a search monopoly. Google PageRank seems flawless and difficult to compete with which is why I think so many people are interested in what Powerset is doing. Powerset even licensed technology from the Palo Alto Research Center to create a search engine that reads every sentence on the web.

So what makes Powerset different and how do they have the audacity to think they can compete with Google. One sentence: “Unlike other search engines that index keywords, Powerset does a deep linguistic analysis on every sentence it reads.” This line is impressive enough to even get Carl Page, the brother of Google co-founder Larry Page invested in Powerset.

The above news is so 2006, so what is Powerset doing these days? They are gearing for their 2008 launch:

Powerset is opening Labs. Powerset Labs comprises of a community of users to provide feedback and suggestions for perfecting Powerset.

The Labs demonstrates two of Powerset’s natural technologies: Powermouse and User Cases. Use Cases shows users how natural language results that keyword indexing fails at. These users can vote on which has better results. Powermouse is where various user interfaces for Powerset is contained. “When users enter a query into Powermouse, they’re able to browse the ‘facts’ stored in the index.”

Powerset Labs was announced at TechCrunch40. Powerset Labs is available at labs.powerset.com.