I recently visited Powerset to get a look at the company's much buzzed-about search technology based on the semantic understanding of language. Powerset is not the next Google but it does have an interesting technology thanks to its dozens of noted academics in lingustics and artificial intelligence.

The first product is a hand-optimized use of its technology to search Wikipedia along with Freebase, an open-source database of information. The results are fascinating in that the search results provide a new way to navigate through subjects. You can see what Powerset calls "factz" similar to facts, which are terms drawn from the subject matter dispersed throughout the two databases, that highlight and summarize complex subjects.

It takes a lot of computing power and time for Powerset to process a web page and it generates a lot of metadata. Thanks to Moore's law and Powerset's computing architecture, this processing time will continue to shrink but right now it cannot be used to process the entire web in a similar way to that of the major search engines because of those constraints.

There are about 2.5m pages in Wikipedia which is a lot of information and a good size to demonstrate Powerset's technology. Wikipedia was chosen because of its open license.

I can think of many uses for Powerset's approach such as improved ad serving based on meaning rather than contextual keywords.

What will be Powerset's next product? I wonder how many types of searches require a semantic understanding? It'll be interesting to find out. In the meantime I encourage you to take Powerset for a spin.

Here is Powerset's news release: