Congrats Powerset
Microsoft bought Powerset today. Those who read my blog (I don't know if anyone does), I helped Powerset for many months, not only as a beta tester, but also as a friendly-user in coming up with a slogan for the final product launch. Though I am not sure whether my slogan was ever chosen as the finalist, it was one of the top 5 they liked, and it was a defining moment in my life nonetheless. Anyhow, today they have been acquired by Microsoft, and will finally have the resources, in terms of employees and cash, to develop Powerset into something that can go beyond just browsing Wikipedia. With this acquisition, two interesting thoughts came to my mind, when reading the tech blog posts about this acquisition:
Many people have been complaining that searching Wikipedia as a search engine is pointless. I tend to disagree just a tad bit, and its somewhat simple reasoning, though possibly flawed. As a high school student, I know one thing. Almost all kids are up to date with technology, therefore they know of both Wikipedia and Google. Furthermore, I've started realizing that more and more kids are turning to Wikipedia to find answers, rather than that of Google. While Google may take numerous minutes in finding an answer, Wikipedia with its collection of 2 million articles is much easier to gather answers from. Though Wikipedia, may not have all the information right now, it continues to get larger and larger, and equally more useful. With this said, I think Powerset's technology is definitely useful, because Wikipedia is a powerful source for information for future generations, and a method to search it is definitely needed. Powerset fills this hole in my mind.
My second thought regarding Powerset is that it's definitely something amazing, and that in it's future it will hopefully browse the internet as a whole, rather than just Wikipedia and Freebase. An interesting thought that came up on this thought, other than the vast improvement in relevancy it aims to provide, was that rather than linking to the page in which the information could be found, by clicking on the link would Powerset be able to find the exact location of the phrase one is searching for in a page. For example, if I were to click on a page with 3000 words, and the phrase I was searching for was imbedded somewhere in the jumble of words, would Powerset be able to take me directly to the phrase and highlight it, rather than me pressing CTRL+F and searching once more? I know for a fact, that a year back Google purchased a techonology/company that allowed one to view a snapshot of the information in a page rather than clicking on a link, however they are yet to integrate this in there search engine.
Searching the internet just got a whole lot better.
UPDATE: I see that this post is getting some views, so if you have comments, even if you disagree on ideas, please post them.
Thanks!
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