Powerset, any chance you’ll ever launch?
Once upon a time, AltaVista was the best search engine on the Internet. Then they got sloppy, and Google blew past them.
We’ve been hearing forever, it seems, that Powerset will do to Google what Google did to AltaVista. How that’s going to happen, we’re not really sure.
Powerset had another swath of puff pieces scribed about them after their latest public appearance, at the TechCrunch 40 conference. It sounds like Powerset has done some interesting things with natural language search.
You won’t find out for yourself, though. Powerset’s current home page invites people to sign up for their oh-so-limited beta test. At TC 40, they announced they would make their technology available for testing on Powerset Labs.
That’s another page with a ’submit your email here’ box. So they’re two for two on setting up invite pages, but a big zero on putting something out there that people beyond their West Coast coterie can see.
If there’s a company positioning itself to be flipped on launch, Powerset sure looks like the top candidate. Fan the hype, build the buzz, show some controlled demos to people who’ve bought in to the message, profit.
While we’re waiting for, you know, an actual product, there’s always the Powerset Flickr stream. Ooh, screenshots, how exciting!
Hi, this is Mark Johnson, the product manager of Powerset Labs. I’d love to let everyone in at once to try our technology, but the demand has been completely overwhelming. In order to make sure everyone has a great experience and the community grows organically, we’re inviting users in waves, with the eventual goal of letting everyone in. Feel free to drop me an e-mail if you want a demo.
Geez, they even spew the spin in blog comments - “the demand has been completely overwhelming”. A “demo”? Why don’t you just send some more BS screenshots.
Lets be realistic, even if there are 50,000 or 100,000 of us geeks out there reading posts like this that would be generous. Open up the labs if you have something.
[…] http://blogs.webpronews.com/2007/09/18/powerset-any-chance-youll-ever-launch/ […]
They have built an index on Wikipedia which is on the order of 10’s of millions of pages (the likes of which can easily fit on one computer). Now all they have to do is scale that to a real search engine size (approx. 1000x bigger - so we have something to search) and scale it to load (so we can all use it at the same time) . That is the real problem. NLP has been around for decades. They do seem to have excellent technology in place for creating headlines and raising money. Unfortunately they are where the other engines were 10 years ago when the power of one computer was as powerful as my current phone.