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Powerset Goes Live

Powerset has come out of stealth mode, going live with a public beta version of its semantic search engine. Charles Knight wraps up the coverage that the highly lauded "Google-killer" accumulated in the year leading up to its release, including announcements about its $10 million initial round of financing, blog posts about how the engine was going to work, and a rant from Danny Sullivan about why semantic search (and therefore Powerset) didn't really pose a threat to core search.

Still, the buzz around Powerset has been palpable, and Knight explains why. "This release is the first step in Powerset changing the way users search and consume web content," he says. "Unlike traditional search engines, which look for words, Powerset matches the meaning of the users' query to the meaning of sentences."

Users can test the engine at www.powerset.com, though it currently only sifts through Wikipedia entries and Freebase (another community-style info database).

Read the whole story at Alt Search Engines »

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