Summary: It's an expectations game and the combination of all the pre-launch hype and the execution of this launch did them in. A classic case of over-promising and under-delivering.
Try searching for "Who was the tenth President of the US?" on both Powerset and Google to see the power of "natural language search" in action.
No one in a position of importance said this demo was a google killer. It's not, it's basically a technology demo and hopefully a usable tool.
If you want a more fair comparison (you may not), site restrict your search to wikipedia and then compare. Both powerset and google don't do well here, the closest they get (and they both get nearly the same answer for the first few hits) is a mention of the tenth Vice President. I'll tell you why:
Tables. The data for this is in "List of Presidents of the United States" in a purely tabular format. Tables suck for everyone right now! They're not really NL, they're not keywordable, they're basically a nightmare because they require a pretty surreal amount of context to grok.
This isn't really an excuse, I admit. Powerset is working on it, but we just couldn't have it ready and still put out something when we wanted. At some point you have to put out something to show the world, and most powersetters feel the current tool is interesting and helpful. It's not perfect, or even necessarily complete, but I don't think anyone with an informed opinion expected it to be a google killer.
But seriously, if you're going to do a comparison at least go apples-to-apples and site-restrict to wikipedia. And yes, today at the lunch table the talk was all about what new data sources to grow into next, and it's publicly available information that we want to scale to the entire web.
Half the point of a pre-product like this (and lots of sites start out with reduced-power versions of their final product, even Google) is to just get the infrastructure made. Anyone who's got half a brain can tell you that getting infrastructure to handle non-trivial search is a huge task. You have query analysis, you have indexing, you have parallelized index servers, you have failover, these days you have EC2, you have databases and backups and monitoring and performance analysis and... arg. It's a lot of work.
And that's _done_ now. Powerset has a real infrastructure serving real queries to real people off a real index which is updating in real time (as fast as we can afford to do it right now). This isn't the end of Powerset's effort, it's the beginning. I wish people would take it as such.
1. I don't think the demo is a Google killer, but you can't deny that that's how Powerset-the-company has positioned itself in the market. Any product they launch is going to be viewed in that light.
2. Even if I restrict the Google queries to site:wikipedia.org Powerset does no better. That's why I said, even at face value, I just don't buy the product.
3. Excuses. You guys have been parsing Wikipedia for over a year now. I remember the days of "Who did PeopleSoft acquire?" versus "Who acquired PeopleSoft?" This current product is still on that same level.
I have a background in computational linguistics so I understand the scale of what you all trying to do. But the best the web developer in me can muster is a big shrug.
Ya know...I feel for you, but right now you're a victim of your company's own PR. If Powerset hadn't been blasted through everyone's media filter as a Google-killer, I don't think anyone would care that your first product is tiny and incomplete.
Expectations management is important. That said, if you guys have the resources to persevere, this might not matter. Ask Microsoft about the Zune....
Powerset didn't apply this moniker. In fact, the PR has been trying to deflate it. The media hungers for the fall of the Big Guy, and any story that can play the angle of "The Next Big Thing" gets more hits than, "Check out this interesting startup!"
Maybe we could have managed it better, maybe we couldn't have. My department is engineering, so I don't know. But I'd like to pretend at least a few people are interested in the more moderate but still fascinating reality. :)
"No one in a position of importance said this demo was a google killer. It's not, it's basically a technology demo and hopefully a usable tool."
Doesn't matter. In this game it's all perception, and if you're launching a consumer facing product your first major PR volley could be your last.
The caveat above doesn't come through in a headline. And it's little help that PowerSet is solving a problem no one seems to have quite yet. The theme of the day is Google comparisons, but in my mind unless PowerSet is blowing your mind on it's own without comparison, it's dead in the water.
As a completely anecdotal data point, I read a bunch of tech news sites (preddit, newsyc, engadget, etc), but I had never actually clicked through to read anything about Powerset, and had no idea that they'd been working for a year or two.
It's (just about?) an impossible task to get anyone to switch from Google, so the _only_ chance they have is to imply that they are in fact different, much better, and yes, Google-killers. So, while I agree with the article in that the results aren't there yet, the only way they're going to get any traction is if they're simultaneously making the product better and screaming very loudly that they're awesome.
So, while they may have under-delivered, I don't think they've over-promised, because I still haven't heard any message, and still don't care much. I'd be more than happy to give'em another 30 seconds in 6 months to see if it's better than "key words wikipedia".
Try searching for "Who was the tenth President of the US?" on both Powerset and Google to see the power of "natural language search" in action.