Powerset: Move Over, Google

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Powerset will harness people power to improve the engine itself. Enter Powerset Labs, or Powerlabs for short, a site where a community of search engine enthusiasts can try out the engine, view video demos, and contribute ideas to improve it. A video demonstrates how the new method works.

Comparable to Digg.com, where readers can vote stories up or down a page, Powerlabs features a "new idea" button at the bottom of each page, so people can write in ideas for better search methods or features. They also can earn "karma" points to get access to new demos and gain community stature. "The wisdom of the crowds can raise the best ideas to the top," says Scott Prevost, Powerset's director of product.

Crafting Natural-Language Queries

Still, Powerset faces a key challenge even beyond the considerable difficulty of indexing the entire Web and returning results at lightning-fast speed. Its search engine will require users to change how they search away from typing in keywords—which Powerset's Pell dismisses as "grunting pidgin"—and toward full phrases, sentences, and questions. The more people type, the more of an edge Powerset may have in divining meaning from queries and producing more relevant results than just from keywords. "Absolutely this requires a change in user behavior," says Pell. "People have to go and learn that."

Indeed, that's the other key reason for launching Powerlabs. For instance, one demo lets people plug words into boxes separated by subject, verb, and object, the key components of a sentence. The idea is to show people how the Powerset search engine finds results differently once people learn to craft more complete queries. Another demo has sample questions into which names or other words can be typed and compares the results to those of "the other guys," namely Google.

For now, the demos are based only on Wikipedia. Pell says that's to test the system before going to the enormous expense of indexing the entire Web. And for now, the general public can't take part. Powerset will register about 500 people a week drawing from those who have signed up at its Web site.

Google executives have said that natural-language search could be years away from practical use and that linguistic analysis hasn't produced notably better results so far, which Powerset disputes. At the same time, there's little doubt Google's search wizards are examining the possibilities and are positioned to take swift advantage if the technology pans out. But even if Google isn't threatened by the competition anytime soon, it's clear the search game is far from over.

Hof is BusinessWeek's Silicon Valley bureau chief.