The public will get its first chance Monday to test a search engine from start-up
Powerset that eschews
conventional keyword technology and instead is designed to understand the meaning
of Web pages.

As such, Powerset's search engine holds the promise of fundamentally changing
people's expectations for search engines by, in theory, offering a smarter,
more efficient experience.

However, Powerset's beta version, while delivering impressive results, has
a limited scope and index, leaving unanswered questions about its ability to
work its magic at the massive scale of Google's keyword-based search engine.

"We're changing the way information is searched by doing a much deeper
analysis of the pages we index," said Scott Prevost, Powerset's product
director.

Keyword engines treat pages as word bags, indexing their content without grasping
its meaning, he said. Meanwhile, Powerset's engine, applying technology developed
in-house as well as licensed from Xerox's PARC subsidiary, creates a semantic
representation by parsing each sentence and extracting its meaning. "Meaning
is what we index," he said.

In an interview in October with IDG News Service, Marissa Mayer, Google's vice
president of Search Products & User Experience, acknowledged that the company's
search engine should -- and will -- overcome its keyword dependence in time.

"People should be able to ask questions and we should understand their
meaning, or they should be able to talk about things at a conceptual level.
We see a lot of concept-based questions -- not about what words will appear
on the page but more like 'what is this about?'. A lot of people will turn to
things like the semantic Web as a possible answer to that," she said.

But she added that Google's search engine acts smart thanks to the humongous
amount of data it crunches. "With a lot of data, you ultimately see things
that seem intelligent even though they're done through brute force," she
said. As examples, she cited a query like "GM," which the engine interprets
as "General Motors" but if the query is "GM foods," it delivers
results for "genetically-modified foods." "Because we're processing
so much data, we have a lot of context around things like acronyms. Suddenly,
the search engine seems smart, like it achieved that semantic understanding,
but it hasn't really," she said.

For now, Powerset's index is very limited, consisting only of millions of pages
from Wikipedia and Metaweb
Technologies' Freebase,
a Web-based structured database of information. However, Prevost vows that the
index will begin growing within a month after its launch and eventually rival
in size those of Google,
Yahoo and others. "Our
technology fully scales," he

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