Powerset ( Mathematical Pun )

Lot has been said about Powerset since its inception and blogosphere has not spared it either after its release in the recent past. Search is one of the toughest problems - given the magnitude and the sheer plethora of the information around. Though most of the blogs concerning the Powerset launch deal with how the management ended up having all the NLP grads(from Stan etc) and paid them 100k+ to develop this platform in SF; i will try to share some personal experience with this engine and how my expectations hasn't been satiated still.

Powerset was touted to be a Q&A engine with 'human' intelligence inbuilt into it. I was expecting some practical applications of Discourse theory too here. But neither were 'visible' in the experience that i had.

This blog is by no means a comprehensive review of the entire engine and its product strategy and the market segmentation brought on by Powerset, but sheer reflections of some emotions(read 'rants').

read on...

--> I was confused for a minute when i first saw the page result(search-hits) after doing the search for 'gandhi'. Now you need to understand when i say this that, i am referring to a 'typical' lane man who wants to search for some recipe or some term. There are just too many UI elements which can easily confuse your grand-mom.

--> I did a search for 'gandhi' and the results that i got were nowhere related to Gandhi(noun) but to the movie and the music bands and etc (in the tabbed bar above the Factz). Hence, i am not going to share what happened when i did a Q search (you may check other blogs for guys who did 'ask' question and the answers were a sheer 'mashup' of all the 'associated' keywords)!

--> The Factz were just too simple and i could not much gather anything from it, except for a solo fact which stated 'Quit India Movement'. The Factz look more like Powerset has simply searched on the n-grams gathered from all of the Wikipedia articles which has a 'rough' semantic association with the word 'gandhi'.

--> The widget on the right of the page (with delicious/reddit/et al links) is simply not required here. Atleast this could be made to bookmark the link with the search-word, but it instead bookmarks the powerset.com site. Anyway, I find this as a criminal waste of screen real estate.(But on a different note, this can be accommodated now, as Powerset has just launched and would be just interested in getting themselves bookmarked the max number of times - somehow, i don't subscribe to this PoV).

--> At the bottom of the page, the section on "Exploring the following pages on Powerset" is something that is simple but yet elegant. I would have preferred to see this result than seeing the Factz.(This is something similar to Sponsored Searches found in many other sites and corporate portals).

--> When you click on any of the result-hits, then the link opens in a new page ; which has an Article Outline on the right. Again, i simply would not even look at this - frankly speaking i did not even observe this, probably it was in my blindspot. Also, the way in which it slides when the page is scrolled - nice effect , but does not amaze me.

Concluding remarks:
# It looks like the entire is just an Alpha release , am sure that the Powerset team can collate its entire '(in)organic intelligence' and take this product to the next level; in the current release its a sheer play with ngrams and some named entity recognition (NER). Am sorry to say, but this does not look like the much-anticipated-Google/Live/Ask-Killer; in fact, not even closer to any of the latter. I would prefer Clusty.com to Powerset.

# Indexing all the wikipedia articles using Lucene/Solr, some NER and using the faceted searching would end up having almost similar results. I somehow opine that using simple algorithms and heuristics often ends up in having 'almost-similar' results than spending millions of USD and thousands of man-hours on developing a product that would be a step advanced than the former.

# Some bloggers have stated that Powerset can be a probable fit in the Enterprise Search space - but still solr+some-nlp-lib would be better of there (or use Google CSE ;) )

# Get the footer of the page properly aligned!!! It looks really bad in Firefox - The text "Privacy Policy" and "Except where" overlap badly.

......... And its not necessary that all sites have to be Javscript powered to give it a 'cool' look&feel .. simplicity rocks!

The Search

It is interesting to see the plethora of search engines coming up almost every month trying to solve a particular aspect(problem) in searches and claiming them to be potential 'Google-Killers'. I admire Google for its ability to 'create' consumer markets than just following or doing what the consumer needs. This is very important for a product firm which does wish to succeed and has the guts to run the extra mile and implement some bleeding edge technologies. Google took a very simple requirement of enabling better data management on the web to a completely different level and is unarguably the best in its class now. Numerous books/articles/blogs have been written and eulogies sung in praise of Google; but at the same time I would like to raise a concern that I have been noticing for the past couple of months.

Google's relevance of results is decreasing day-by-day. I see loads of spam in Google's BlogSearch. There is no effective 'innovation' in the data-visualization and the way the results are being presented to the user continues to remain the same; and the Ads are also being presented in the same format.

IMHO, i would say the following 3 features to be 'most-essential' for the next search-engine startup to be successful:
- Duplicate Elimination (Chris Manning's group in Stan-NLP is doing some amazing research in this, and i guess a stealth-mode startup would have already started)
- Social searches (Something similar to what the Israeli startup Delver is doing - but of a much greater magnitude and more 'intelligent')
- Data Visualization

Update: Got 2 new books to read:
1) Phantoms in the Mind , By V.S.Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee
2) Indian Unbound , By Gurucharan Das

Kindling the Android

Amazon launches Kindle. Jeff Bezo's announcement!

The game(or is it a war???) between Kindle vs Publishing industry (print media) is going to be something that is worth watching now. The arena has been thrown open and i cannot but see the gladiator winning.

Android is interesting. My first rendezvous with Android SDK was interesting.

Is someone thinking along both the lines ;)

Image Searches

Being an ardent fan of Google(its philosophy-technology-products) sometimes does stimulate you search for some other product that tries to beat it. I did not expect M$ to even come close to Google ; for its the sheer simplicity of the latter coupled with amazing performance and features that has pushed itself to greater heights and better customer experience.

I was playing around with the Image searches being offered by Google and M$(Live) and i was surprised by the results and the performance/features of the Image Search Engines.To my limited knowledge , neither of the Image Search Engines support "Content Based" Searches and its mostly "Context Based" based searches (sic! wherez the intelligence!!).

I found that M$ Image Search experience to be highly satisfying when compared to that of Google's. The images are displayed in a neater format (without any verbiage) and when the mouse hovers on the images, the properties associated with the image is displayed. There is a sleek slider on the right-hand top that controls the number images and their size that is displayed in the page region.



Features in other Image Search engines :

AltaVista : Has an LoV(Drop down) at the top of the page wherein you can specify whether one wants B/W images or Color - this is really interesting!

Pixsy : really slow!! But has some dimensional refinements - on Content Type , Categories,Sources. But instead of showing all along the left hand side, i would allow the user to save the options in his/her preferences and hence allowing more space for the images to be displayed.

For a complete list of other Image Search engines - visit this

Google StreetView

Being a street-photographer is very challenging and interesting. Clicking the different moods of people and mundane things though may sound very boring but is one of the toughest things to click without disturbing the subjects.

Last week Google launched a new product called 'StreetView' - a mindblowing product/service. It basically gives you the street view of all the things happening around(though not a live service)- and wait its not just 2Dimentionsal ... it gives a 360 degree view of what all is present in the street.

Apparently the technology behind this is patented by Immersive Media. The pictures that one sees are not Live , but we can expect the cameras to be installed as various prominent positions in various street intersections and give us some really interesting views [no need of hidden cameras??? ;) ]

Youtubing some of the videos is simply amazing - i no longer want to use the word 'perspective' as the user can see 'EVERYTHING' in here ;)

Google Again!

Been sometime since i researched on Google. My Last Post on Google was the review of the 'The Google Story' that i had read. Its been sometime(almost 2-3months) since i have touched the newpapers or online news portals.

However, I stumbled upon a Google bug today (similar to one that i had found sometime back) . I am not sure whether this is a desired functionality as envisaged by the Google Search Result Page Desgin architect(or whatever they are called as) :

Try searchig for a term from the quick search bar from the Firefox browser(provided you have a Google engine installed). The search result page will be displayed, but the mechnism to go to the successive result page seems to be lacking - that is the numbers that lead you to more pages. Have a look at the difference in the results generated from the Firefox Google Search Engine and the Google Toolbar installed in IE.

The Google Story

I have just finished this book - " The Google Story" By " David A.Vise.

I must say that its a must-read for a any Google enthusiast/fan who has been following this organization's spectacular growth in the past 7 years. Its also a must-read for all the ardent cribbers in the IT industry who have perfected the art of "How to Crib - the Programmer's Way".

Google's story is a perfect example of how technology drives business. Organizations that thrive on technology have always been successful in business , and Google is a perfect example of this.

The books dwelves into how Google started, the challenges that its faced and how it has burgeoned into a Internet Giant posing threats to the big-wigs like Microsoft and its future expansion plan. The book gives deep inghts into the corporate history of this 'noun' , that has become a 'verb these days.

A few lines from the book :

• "youth + freedom + transparency + new model + the general public's benefit + belief in trust = The Miracle of Google" Context: this is Mr.Lee's ( from MS to Google) definition of Google

• "Every declared war begins with a opening salvo of some kind" Context : Google's vs Microsoft

Google and BETA's

( This post is a follow-up to the previous post on Google , wherein i had serious doubts on the way the organization is making inroads into all the Internet-Based-Services)

I did a small sample survey of the existing Google Products/Services (List is here) and came up with the following observation :

Search Products
Alerts : BETA
Blog Search : BETA
Book Search : BETA
Catalogs : BETA
Desktop : BETA
Finance : BETA
Froogle : BETA
Scholar : BETA
Video : BETA
Images : NOT A BETA
Google Maps : NOT A BETA
News : NOT A BETA
Directory : NOT A BETA
Earth : NOT A BETA
Specialized Searches : NOT A BETA
Toolbar : NOT A BETA
Web Search : NOT A BETA ( Thats a Great News !!)

Explore and innovate
Co-op : BETA

Communicate, show & share
Calendar : BETA
Gmail : BETA
Groups : BETA
Talk : BETA
Picasa : NOT A BETA
Translate : NOT A BETA
Blogger : NOT A BETA

Go mobile
Maps for mobile : BETA
Mobile : BETA
SMS : BETA

Download the latest software
Pack : BETA


From the Google's Search Products Stables (which is the organization's forte ):
Number of Betas : 9
Number of non-Betas : 8

Most of those products that are "Not in Beta" have come up from the organizations that Google has bought over the past couple of year. Examples include - Picasa, Earth and Blogger. Writely is in the pipeline :-)


All Products:
Number of Betas : 18
Number of non-Betas : 11

Google -- Where is it heading to????

We have seen this org grow from a measely Stan project to a Search-Engine Giant in a span of little over 8 years. Google's market-cap has increased by leaps and bounds and is far ahead of the rivals Yahoo,Ask and MSN. MSN's AdCenter or Yahoo's so-called 'enhanced-ad-placement services' have not affected this Giant. Danny Sullivan, the editor of Search Engine Watch (the website is a lot cluttered - hence ahem!!), still ranks Google as Numero-Uno.

But, as this story/article points out - is Google making forays into all the available sectors just for the heck of it, without caring for the excellance in each of the services that they are providing thus far?? Google News came out of the Beta version just months back(after a 'brief' testing period of around 3 years ) ; Gmail is still in Beta. We saw Google trends being launched last week and today i see Google Notebook . This is similar to Microsoft's OneNote, but with a cleaner and 'WIP' interface.

As always, Google Notebook , though still in its infancy has lots of features that are yet to be implemented; we are prompted with a WIP page on some of the features that are yet to be completed.

Try this out in IE: Login to Gmail and click on the "New Features" hyperlink on the top-tight corner of the page.That will lead you to this page. Now, did that work in IE??? Try the same in Mozilla's Firefox -- ?????? Google wake up!

A prudent customer would never settle for an uncompleted(beta) product - though he may use just for the heck of it , if that is offered freely.

I see lots of bloggers blogging about Google Trends and how intelligent it is; but at the same time we fail to see the other pothholes that Google is offering to its 'customers'. I have been a fanatic of Google since 2000, but it's 'Dalmatian-Service' does bother me.

Now on a slighlty different note..We have seen Google News being offered based on the demography of the customer (i.e., country-based)...i was contemplating on Google offering its new services on similar lines....It has already made inraods into radio-advertising in the USofA; I was thinking about Google offering Kiosks in India. (Kiosks in this context are touch based simple screens ,which will take inputs from the user and present results accordingly).These kiosks will be strategically located all across the country and will offer its 'services' to its custmers free-of-cost.

again Googling...

I found this awsum site that talks a lot about snippets/facts that people would not be aware abt GOOGLE....check this out :
http://men.style.com/gq/features/full?id=content_422

A World without Google !!!

Google has almost become synonymous to the cry 'F1'(FYI : Save me!!). watever v dont know v end up searching on the net...the lingo being used is -"just google" -- u will end up finding almost all kinds of stuff from Grandma's favourite cookery recipe to NASA's Opportunity and Spirit and also about Britney spear's child ;-)

I just cannot imagine a world without Google.....so i dont think i can write much on the "would be world - without Google". But my extra-sensory perceptions do say that a World without Google will be no world at all ;-)