After a lot of buzz around the future-to-be Google killer, Powerset has finally released a limited showcase version of its new semantic search tool that speaks ‘natural language’. The new search engine is designed to search Wikipedia articles providing more relevant results and sometimes even direct answers to your questions. Powerset’s search engine claims to be able to unlock the actual meaning of every word in Wikipedia.

Google and other search engines can’t really understand the content they read, they can’t tell if a word is used as a noun or verb, perceiving it just as a set of symbols. This is, of course, a very simplified concept of the search algorithm. Search engines do have a bit of ‘intelligence’ but it is more like guessing based on statistical data rather then the ability to read into words deciphering their actual meaning.

The technology behind Powerset, on the other hand, claims to understand the meaning of words and their relations in the sentence. Although Powerset can’t really speak the language we do, it can analyze the information extracting the facts and their relations. Continue Reading