Blog Insights: A new era in search

What bloggers are saying about the latest in information technology



Google, Yahoo and MSN, the top dogs of the search business, actually use technology that's fairly simple. Their search engines don't really understand language as people do, they merely recognize individual words and do statistical analyses on them to generate results that are likely to have something to do with what the searcher actually wants.

Google, by far the largest and deep-pocketed of the three, got to where it is today not because of excellent technology, but because they found a good way to monetize it with contextual ads. And it's money, more than pure science and technology, that drives the growth of the Internet. My theory about it is that an Internet company with "pretty good" technology and a strong focus on monetization is more likely to beat out an Internet company with superior technology and less focus on monetization. As consumers, we tend to accept "pretty good" so long as it is convenient. That's why there are so many dollar stores. Why do people shop there? Because things are cheap, there's probably one in your neighborhood, and the things you buy there may not be the best, but they are good enough to get you by.

A startup called Powerset announced $12.5 million in first-round venture funding last week, and an aggressive plan to change the very nature of search technology. Of course, by Google standards, $12.5 million is pocket change, and Powerset has some very well-moneyed rivals to take on. But, on the other hand, successful tech companies have been launched with less, and I'll give them credit for taking on the 800-pound gorilla. And of course, their technology is from Xerox PARC, which is by no means dollar-store technology.

The big difference is Powerset's natural language technology, which understands queries made in natural language. If you type "what is the name of Paris Hilton's dog" into the Google search bar, Google's engine sees eight individual words, and attempts to generate results that are probably relevant based on a statistical analysis of that clump of words. (The answer is "Tinkerbell".) Powerset, on the other hand, recognizes a sentence, and each word's relationship with the other.

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