That said, I’d love to see exploratory search on the Wikipedia corpus. We implemented a quick and dirty prototype at Endeca, and it was good enough to encourage me to build out the real thing. Unfortunately it’s not exactly aligned with Endeca’s business model of selling to enterprises, and Jimbo has his own ideas about building a search engine for Wikipedia.

Full disclosure, I’m a big advocate of exploratory search: (link)

Geoffrey Moore wrote that for a new entrant to break into a market, their solution has to be 10X better than the previous one. Since wikipedia has a pretty good experience, Powerset looks to be going after a very hard target.

Semantic search has tremendous power for vertical where search on Google is broken. (vacations, jobs, real estate, even cars.) These are searches where you may not know how to describe what you want. “Cool 60’s convertable” or “fun warm weather vacation” are queries that a person would get, but Google would choke on.

(link)

CognitionADMATCHER(TM) – The Cognition Ad Matcher interprets the meaning of queries, documents, ad phrases and ad copy. Using meaning as the medium, this ad placement technology maximizes the number of ad phrases matched, and minimizes the number of poor matches to ad phrases.

If these companies focused less on the public facing Web search objective and more on the relevance issue for advertisers and publishers, I believe they would indeed be applying the Innovators Solution paradigm to attacking Google where it counts, in it’s advertising biz. Still, it will be tough to get to the critical mass of advertisers and sites that Google has attained, but I believe they’re more exposed there than in the search service.

Search 1. “Which team was third in the European basketball championship 2007?”
Search 2. “eurobasket 2007 bronze”

For Google site:wikipedia.org added.

Search 1. Cognition - basically nothing. Powerset - keyword search, rather than semantic search (not much different than standard wikipedia search, btw!). Google - 3rd result for “Eurobasket 2007″ page, 6th result is the answer.

Search 2. Cognition - 2 results, but #1 is the coach name. Powerset - gives something more interesting, with lots of Lithuanian basketball players and includes women’s result as well. Google #1 result pretty much says it all… Wikipedia standard does not even have a clue what I mean :)

Conclusion. Google is by far number one and looks unbeatable. Powerset is interesting, but I have a slight suspicion they’re cheating a bit. If they’re not - they need to improve a little, but they have a chance. Cognition is useless.

This is just one search string, of course…

Powerset: (link)
Cognition: (link)
Google: (link)

Decide for yourselves, but I give Google the win here, since it at least returns pages containing answers to the question, even if those answers don’t come back in the snippets.

I’m not a Google fanboy–I make a living beating Google in the enterprise, and I believe that some of what we are doing applies to the open web. But I’m not convinced that today’s natural language “semantic search” options are the answer.

More at my blog: (link)

One needs to point out that the Powerset results really shine when it searches Freebase. The underlying structure really helps. So the question is that as we add more structure and appropriate markup (RDFa, microformats) to web pages, does the way we search change?

I am still not convinced that NLP works on general text, at least not well enough or fast enough.