Having been long predicted as the shaping the next generation of search, Semantic Web Applications are now coming to the fore with Powerset leading the way. Powerset has released its beta version, allowing the public to finally try out the new key word technology. Ushering the new era of search, Powerset hopes to change people’s expectations of search by offering a far more intelligent and efficient form of searching, at least in theory.
“We’re changing the way information is searched by doing a much deeper analysis of the pages we index,” said Scott Prevost, Powerset’s product director.
Keyword engines treat pages as word bags, indexing their content without grasping its meaning, he said. Meanwhile, Powerset’s engine, applying technology developed in-house as well as licensed from Xerox’s PARC subsidiary, creates a semantic representation by parsing each sentence and extracting its meaning. “Meaning is what we index,” he said.
Google’s Marissa Mayer has even elaborated on the benefit of the semantic web…
“People should be able to ask questions and we should understand their meaning, or they should be able to talk about things at a conceptual level. We see a lot of concept-based questions — not about what words will appear on the page but more like ‘what is this about?’. A lot of people will turn to things like the semantic Web as a possible answer to that,” she said.
She also said that Google seems intelligent more through brute force because of the amount of data it crunches rather than it being really “smart” and working out what the user really means when they are searching for certain terms.
I can already see Google Scurrying to upgrade their system to incorporate this though… they certainly have the budget to do it. The current form of Powerset is limited, consisting only of millions of pages from Wikipedia and Metaweb Technologies’ Freebase, a Web-based structured database of information. Whatever it is, here’s to ushering in a new era in search, one that will ultimately provide a real challenge to the Google’s and Yahoo’s of our increasingly connected world.
Could this possibly be the beginning of a Web 3.0?
